Time flies. It's 20 years since we signed Andrew Johns. 

It came completely out of the blue. I remember how I found out - logging on to this forum and seeing a thread titled "Andrew Johns" that had appeared that morning and already had about 20 pages. I was thinking what has he got to do with Wire?  He was easily the best player in the world at the time. He'd been out earlier in the season and came back in time for the second Origin game after Queensland had won the first one and had what often gets described as the greatest Origin performance of all time to level and then win the series. It was unbelievable to see that we had signed him.

This was an era where it felt like we were resetting the ambition of the club. We'd got the new stadium a year before, Simon Moran became majority shareholder, we'd signed Gleeson and we were having a good season. 2005 was the peak of the Cullen era. We were an attacking team and we could carve teams up down the right hand side with Briers, Gleeson, Logan Swann and Fa'afili. Brent Grose playing fullback was the best fullback in SL that year. Ben Westwood had moved to the pack and was transformed as a player. We had a run of about 10 wins in 11 games and that was the first time since the Jonathan Davies era a decade earlier when we'd had a consistent winning run like that. We were very good at home and the HJ was rocking for a lot of games especially when they were on Sky. 

The club launched a range of Andrew Johns merchandise (I still go running in a Johns 31 top) and there were huge queues to get in the club shop. The atmosphere of hope and excitement around the club at the time was incredible. We hadn't got into the "its always our year" phase yet, we knew we were still off the pace of the top teams, but it felt like we were ballsy underdogs, willing to have a go. With Andy Gatcliffe as CEO we were more about actions than words. He was never in the papers grandstanding about our ambitions, he made his statements through delivering a stadium and big signings. Contrast that to all the pompous hot air that we have been spouting in the KF era with nothing to back it up. 

When we signed Johns we were the talk of rugby league. There was a lot of jealousy and sniping at the time that what we were doing bringing him over on a short term deal was unethical (we pretty much admitted at the time we'd exploited a loophole that we expected to be closed as it was, and Bradford followed us bringing Adrian Morley in from the Roosters). The papers tried to say it would cause a rift in the squad because we had to deregister an overseas player (Graham Appo). Given that Appo had done nothing, on a supposedly big contract, since his good half season two years ago, I'm sceptical that there were many in the squad who would have argued for him ahead of Andrew Johns!

It was the first time since the Davies era that we had a sense of "anything is possible". I am usually a cynic and don't buy into hype but I remember thinking that given how influential Johns was at that point in his career we could win the title. Newcastle Knights had lost 13 in a row before he came back mid season and won their last 8 out of 11 with him in the team.  

In the end we got one epic game out of Johns - his debut against Leeds - which will go down as one of the most famous games in Wire history. We got a hard lesson at the HJ in the playoffs by John Kear's Hull who were very good at getting up for one off games (they'd just won the Challenge Cup). I'd rank that defeat second only to the 80-0 against Saints in 1996 as my worst memory as a Wire fan. 

But regardless of what happened that signing definitely put us on the map in Australia as a team to note. Big guns from the NRL started coming. Rauhihi, Morley, King, the Monaghans, the Andersons, Hicks, Waterhouse, Hodgson. Would these guys have chosen Warrington without us signing Johns? Who knows. But at the start of that 2005 season if you'd have mentioned those names there's no way you would have expected them to come here. 

They were great times. We still believed in Cullen and we had also signed Martin Gleeson that season too. A real superstar centre. 


Then back down to earth in classic Wire style for the Hull FC home game, a 40-6 hammering, despite easily beating them at the KC stadium the week earlier. 


Agree on the "big guns" but I think we would have got Hodgson either way as he was previously playing for Huddersfield who finished out of the play offs. 

We had a strong team out v Hull and I can remember being gutted. Can't remember how it panned out & why we lost so heavily. 

Probably under prepared and taking Hull lightly as we had beat them the week before. Remember in 2005 we were still conceding 25 points a game on average, and scoring 28. Cullen never did sort our defence but we scored some wonderful tries. 

Probably still the greatest player the game has ever seen. 

Johns legacy took a bit of a battering after he retired with revelations about drugs and using racial slurs about indigenous players. I get the feeling that when he was the biggest star in the game everybody sucked up to him and he got away with a lot of stuff that others would have been pulled up on, so when things finally caught up with him he was indefensible. There are so many great players in Australia that the public and media moved on to more wholesome figures like Cameron Smith and Jonathan Thurston. 

But yes I think he has a strong case for greatest player of all time. He was the most complete player I ever saw. He was sort of like Cristiano Ronaldo was in football. Usually the real flair players have some kind of flaw - weak defensively, not the most athletic or strong. But like CR7, Johns was the most talented flair player in the game but turned himself into a super fit physically dominant athlete. He was incredible defensively and he was strong enough to play as a loose forward. He played hooker a lot of Australia when Brett Kimmorley was around, I remember Chris Anderson the coach being asked about that and he said Johns is the best halfback in the world but he's also the best hooker so it made sense to play him there and fit in Kimmorley. 

Us getting him on a short term deal was like Wakefield getting Wally Lewis in the 1980s. 

It takes a special kind of club to sign the world's best player and make him look bang average within a couple of weeks. Nobody can do that like Warrington can.
Being fair, he wasn't exactly used to playing alongside the likes of Paul Noone.

It was a bit unfair of Hull to turn up and play well. 

He was poor the week earlier when we won at their place.

Yeah 2005 was a really exciting season. I was perousing youtube and came across the 31-30 defeat to Saints with the Long drop goal in the last minute. Here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRB5NLwkiBc I remember being absolutely gutted at the time as we came so close to beating them at Knowsley Road. But watching the highlights back 20 years later we were a joy to watch. We were never water tight in defence but we put on some great tries. Such a world away to todays game in general. I think even then that team in 2005 would wipe the floor with our 2025 squad.

Yeah 2005 was a really exciting season. I was perousing youtube and came across the 31-30 defeat to Saints with the Long drop goal in the last minute. Here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRB5NLwkiBc I remember being absolutely gutted at the time as we came so close to beating them at Knowsley Road. But watching the highlights back 20 years later we were a joy to watch. We were never water tight in defence but we put on some great tries. Such a world away to todays game in general. I think even then that team in 2005 would wipe the floor with our 2025 squad.

We got blitzed by Nathan Blacklock scoring a hat-trick in the first half. 
I just looked back at that Hull team.

Blacklock (who topped the NRL try charts three years in a row) on one wing, and Gareth Raynor on the other. Kirk Yeaman and Richard Whiting in the centres, Richard Horne and Danny Brough in the halves. The pack had Garreth Carvell, Richard Swain, Paul King, Stephen Kearney and Jamie Thackray with Paul Cooke at loose forward. Motu Tony on the bench.

That team if it were around today would be the best team in Super League. Twenty years ago they finished 5th. When they beat us it was regarded as an upset!

A feature of the Cullen era was how good the rugby was that we played. Under so many Wire coaches we've complained about being formulaic and predictable. When Cullen was here we always spread the ball around and looked to attack. I remember Cullen being interviewed about the new stadium and he said he asked for the pitch to be built to maximum width dimensions because he wanted it to suit the way he wanted us to play - to attack and stretch defences. He had a bit of Kevin Keegan about him. 

Gleeson was unplayable that year. Every year after that he declined slightly but he was such a good player at that time. You always felt when we had the ball in an attacking part of the field that a try was on. 

At that stage of Briers career he still ran the ball a lot and spread it wide, although he was starting to develop the precision bombing kicking game that became a hallmark of the TS era, back then his favourite target was Fa'afili who wasn't especially fast but was great at competing for balls in the air. 

The other added dimension we had at the time was Bridge, who was still young and in his first full season as a starter in SL. We hadn't worked out what was his best position yet but he had some big games, including against the eventual champions Bradford when we beat them at Odsal. 

Nat Wood was such a key part to that team and an incredible competitor. He had a similar warrior vibe to Greg Mackey, but he was even more of a player who could make a big play himself when we needed lifting. He was another guy who wasn't especially quick but he was very good at beating people with his footwork and he was strong enough to shake tacklers off. He left at the end of 2005 and the Cullen era was never the same after that, we never worked out how to replace him.