WARRINGTON WOLVES recorded a statement win on the opening night of the new Super League season, defeating last season’s Grand Finalists, Leeds Rhinos, 42-10.

It was a welcome tonic for Wolves coach Daryl Powell and his team who endured a difficult campaign last time out and will be looking to emerge as a force in Super League once again in 2023.

Warrington’s relationship with the Super League competition has been mixed. They've had some great sides, have topped the table on occasion, but are yet to win a Super League Grand Final.

This has led to the common taunt from opposition fans of “it’s always your year, just like the last one, it’s always your year.”

This Super League version of Warrington is one that is expected to win. Under the ownership of Simon Moran — the managing director of one of the largest concert promoters in the UK, SJM Concerts — plenty has been invested, leading to four Challenge Cup wins since Moran bought the club ahead of the 2004 season.

The team’s history as a powerful presence in the sport, but not always a winning one, makes this slightly easier for fans to take.

The hope they can challenge for titles is there, and the Warrington fans have owned that particular taunt and retort with: “It’s always our year...”

Warrington have topped the Super League table twice, but have never won the Grand Final — considered the championship game that comes at the end of a post-season playoff series.

They have been to said final on four occasions, losing one to Leeds in 2012, and to old foes Wigan on three occasions — 2013, 2016, and 2018.

The nature of deciding the champion in Super League is similar to American sports where more emphasis is put on the post-season winner than the team with the best record at the end of the league season.

Warrington boasted such a record in 2011 and 2016, but last season they finished second from bottom, only ahead of the newly promoted team for 2022, Toulouse.

It was one of the worst seasons in the recent history of the team nicknamed the Wire, a nickname that attached itself to the club on the back of the town’s history and prominence in wire manufacturing. It emerged at a time when Lancashire’s collection of towns formed a large, highly productive industrial hub, many of which were written about in Friedrich Engels’s book, The Condition of the Working Class in England.

One of the town’s amateur sports teams was formed by workers at the Rylands Brothers Limited wireworks company and remains active to this day.

There are also links between the rugby club and brewing company that once operated in the town, Greenall Whitley & Co, dating back from the lease of land at their former stadium at Wilderspool in 1898, to the sponsorship of the team from 1990 to 2000.

The Wire nickname remains despite the Wolves rebranding for the Super League era, but the Greenalls links and, sadly, the old stadium in Wilderspool are now gone.

Despite a poor season in 2022, Warrington remain a force in this sport that developed as a professional game in those northern, working-class industrial towns, just as association football grew in towns such as Blackburn, Huddersfield, Burnley, and the nearby big cities of Liverpool, Manchester, and Leeds.

The likes of Wigan, Bradford and Widnes were once to the sport of Rugby League what Liverpool and Manchester United, perhaps even Real Madrid, were to soccer.

It is difficult to make cross-code comparisons between these two forms of football due to their differing global popularity, but in the heartlands of rugby league, from Queensland and New South Wales in Australia to southern France, the names of towns such as St Helens, Warrington, and Castleford might be more familiar there, across the Channel and on the other side of the world, than they are in London.

These towns have experienced varying fortunes since, with Widnes and Bradford now residing in the Championship, while St Helens emerged as the outstanding and most successful English side in recent times, having won the previous four Super League Grand Finals.

On the back of that success, they are the Super League representatives in the 2023 World Club Challenge and face Australia’s NRL champions, Penrith Panthers, in the early hours of Saturday morning — a game which is being shown on Channel 4.

Warrington, meanwhile, suffered in 2022 their most disappointing season since 1998. The “always their year” trope relates to Warrington being a good team but never confirmed as the best. Last season they were the worst team, pound for pound.

The club have shown faith in Powell and given him the opportunity to rebuild, and there were promising signs in last night’s opener.

The Wolves have replenished their pack with Sam Kasiano and Gil Dudson from Catalans Dragons, as well as two NRL imports Paul Vaughan (Canterbury Bulldogs) and Josh McGuire (St George Illawarra Dragons).

The coach also admitted in pre-season that there can be no excuses for him and his players in 2023, and is not playing down Warrington’s ambition despite last year’s disappointment.

“There are high standards within the group and we have worked really hard,” Powell said after the Leeds win.

“We wanted to show we’ve changed things and, as a starting point, we’ve achieved that, but consistency is a different thing.

“What we’re now after is consistency week after week. We rattled Leeds tonight and they didn’t handle it as well as they would have wanted to, but some teams will [handle it better]. It’s then about how we deal with those situations.”

Could 2023 finally be the year of the Wire? It always is.