SUPER LEAGUE XVII has turned out to be a strange old competition and the first two departures from the play-offs sum up just how odd the whole shooting match has been.

Huddersfield Giants and Wakefield Trinity Wildcats bowed out in the elimination play-off games and their exits could not have contrasted any more starkly.

The team who finished seventh in the final table greeted their farewell to the 2012 season with their chins on their chests, while the club that came eighth strode away from the competition feeling like winners.

The experience of Wakefield is perhaps the story that makes most sense.

With John Kear departed and a small band of players who barely constituted a squad remaining, Trinity went into the last close season pretty much starting from scratch.

New coach Richard Agar brought in no fewer than 18 players and this group understandably took time to gel, however the expected dice with the wooden spoon evaporated in the second half of the season and seven consecutive wins took them into the play-offs.

Despite being beaten by Leeds, the Wildcats walked away proud men with Agar talking defiantly of proving that their form at the end of the current season was no flash in the pan come the start of Super League XVIII.

One place above them sat the Giants and defeat at Hull FC brought an agonising end to perhaps the most inexplicable campaign a club has ever had.

With the exact science of hindsight the turning point of the Giants season is easy to spot – it was what turned out to be the ‘not so magic’ weekend.

Under the guidance of Nathan Brown, Huddersfield headed for Manchester in third place in the table for the round 15 match having been beaten just four times in the league and having already booked into the semi-finals of the Challenge Cup.

Whatever the merits of a narrow 38-34 defeat by the Salford City Reds at Eastlands, the upshot was a downward spiral which brought nine more Super League defeats and by the time the Giants returned to Greater Manchester to face Warrington for the right to go to Wembley the club were in disarray and given little chance of upsetting Tony Smith’s Wolves.

The news of the departures of the Browns – coach Nathan and skipper Kevin – seemed outwardly the most obvious changes within the Giants camp during the campaign, but however influential the pair, the fall from grace still appears overly dramatic.

It could be argued that what happened in the first half of the Giants season could be construed as over-achievement – with the balance to that being the fall might have come due to the weight of increased expectation.

Whatever the reason it was sad to see Nathan Brown leave the club without taking the bow he deserved for taking the Giants and their fans to a point where they could genuinely have such great expectations.