West has long been an advocate of once-a-week rugby as well as summer rugby and he is looking forward to having time
West has long been an advocate of once-a-week rugby, as well as summer rugby, and he is looking forward to having time to gear up his side for the next match.The one exception will be during the European Championship in June, when, on recent form, a dozen Wigan players will be playing for England and Wales in midweek and for their club at the weekend "But it's no good complaining. We know what the situation is and we can start to get ready for it."West believes that spectators will react enthusiastically to summer rugby, provided it is meaningful. "If you put on competitive matches at any time of year, the people will come. What it needs is for the Super League to be competitive week after week, not by pulling Wigan back, but by other sides catching up with us.
A lot of clubs are trying very hard to do that."All clubs - including Wigan - have to be thinking already about the higher standard that is going to be required when our top four meet the Australian top four at the end of the season."A European failure in those play-offs, would, West believes, damage the credibility of the whole enterprise "It would be a disaster if it was a 4-0 whitewash," he said "That would embarrass me to hell. So we have to concentrate on standards; getting stronger, fitter and faster and lifting the competitiveness of our game."That same attention to excellence will be West's theme if Wigan take part in what ranks as the most intriguing fixture of the year, against the leading club in the union code, Bath. "If the suggested games go ahead, we would want to give it our best shot," he said. "With the sort of professionals we have at Wigan, they wouldn't have it any other way."That would mean bringing in specialist union expertise to help prepare the side for their outing under 15-a-side rules. "If we can get the right atmosphere, the right grounds, the right financial arrangements - then it is another challenge and something we would be keen to do."If you just pooh-pooh something like this because it is unfamiliar then you are selling yourself short. Who would have thought we would even be talking about it? Who would have thought we would be doing any of the things that we are doing this next year."West is even prepared to countenance something that struck him initially as a non-starter and something that really would make 1996 a 12-month treadmill as well as an exciting adventure - playing a double-header against St Helens over the Christmas period to preserve a lucrative tradition."If the players wanted to do it and it was financially feasible, it could be a goer," he said. "Of course, it's another challenge - playing games like that during the off-season But it's a year of challenges.".
AS HER international comeback day approaches, the British athletics team's most experienced and successful competitor will be as nervous as the youngest international newcomer. Aftermonths of agony both physical and mental, Sally Gunnell has begun to pick up the threads of regular training. But only in her first seriously testing race back, when Britain face France at the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow on 24 February, will she begin to discover whether she can regain her position as the world's No 1 hurdler. Throughout the long period of recovery from the Achilles tendon and heel injuries that cost her most of last summer's events and saw her 400 metres hurdles world record fall to the American Kim Batten in the world championships in Gothenburg, her worry has been less the fear of a recurrence than the possible loss of motivation. Yet she would have been forgiven for resting on her sheaf of laurels and abandoning her career. Instead, her attitude was that "you're a long time retired". Frustration has become her permanent enemy.
"I didn't realise until I stopped running how much I was going to miss it. It was worst when I had to watch the world championships, but I believe I can get the world record back because when I broke it there wasn't the competition there is now. Also, when I broke it, I'd not properly recovered from a cold, so I'm sure I can improve it again."Competition this summer would have been tough even without the burden of recovering from the injuries. Batten herself is likely to come under pressure from Sandra Farmer-Patrick, Tonja Buford, who also improved on Gunnell's world record when second in Gothenburg, and possibly the 400m world champion Marie-Jose Perec, although she has yet to master the hurdling technique.The thought of Atlanta has kept Gunnell going: "It's beenfrustrating. I used to complain about training, but after the injuries I couldn't wait to get back. The work in the gym and the pool was necessary but boring." It had to be done because, almost literally, she had to learn to walk again before she could try to run.In fact it was the years of competition and training, more than any sudden physical crisis, that caused the injuries.
Wear and tear resulted in Achilles damage, and a bone spur had developed on her heel. A Swiss surgeon who had treated Sergei Bubka and Heike Drechsler for similar problems operated, and for a month the Olympic, world, Commonwealth and European champion could only walk with crutches.It was as recently as this month that she took her first tentative strides on the track. She admits that she was not prepared for the pain and that there were moments when she seriously doubted whether a complete recovery was possible. On the other hand she thinks that provided her warm-weather training in South Africa, which begins soon, goes according to plan, the rest may prove to have had some beneficial effect - not physically, but in her attitude to the grind of training, which at the age of 28 had begun to pall.