Pete Barrow: Growing Giants show their mettle

Oct 9 2009 by Peter Barrow, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

And it helps hugely that these two are probably among the most likeable guys you could meet in any sport.

But the Club of the Year award is really the icing on the cake because that has shown how the Giants have gone about ensuring they get the best out of their talent whether they be imports or local youngsters – and irrespective of any perceived place in the pecking order.

So whether you are a Giants fan who has a pot half empty or a pot half full – the difference this time is that the outside world are now taking you seriously.

Next season will be the one where Huddersfield prove, to paraphrase Skinner and Baddiel, if rugby league is coming home!

ISN’T modern technology a wonderful thing.

England’s game against the Ukraine tomorrow is available only on the internet and, aside from a handful of people who actually can stand sitting for 90 minutes in front of a computer screen and have the money to spend in this manner, the rest of us will be transported back to the 1950s.

I’m sorry folks but we are all going to have to huddle around the wireless and take in our national side in action away from old Blighty just like we did when Sir Stanley Matthews lacked a knighthood and had the ‘twinkliest’ pair of feet on the planet.

So my plea to the BBC Five Live team who will be out there beyond the ‘Iron Curtain’ is to enter into the spirit of this step back in time.

Alan Green for a start can drop the Irish lilt and take on the character of Harry Enfield’s comic creation Mr Cholmondley-Warner and explain the game in patronising, painstaking detail to sidekick Grayson (who hopefully will be a top pundit like Graham Taylor or Jimmy Armfield).

Also they could probably bring back the voice in the background that calmly delivers the phrase ‘E3’ or ‘A2’ as they used to when a grid was printed in the Radio Times to show what area of the pitch the ball was in (though I’m led to believe trying to play battleships while listening to the match could cause significant confusion).

So thank you to Setanta and ‘big money’ television (where money seems to be the only issue) for allowing us to start using our minds and having to imagine just what is happening on the pitch.

I for one will be bedecked in my tweeds, leaning on the mantlepiece, smoking a pipe and listening to the Bakelite hoping that those fine chaps such as Steven Gerrard and Rio (where on earth do they get these names these days!) Ferdinand can get the better of those Cossack types.