Very.
A lot of hopes for this season were pinned on the arrival of Widdop from St George Illawarra Dragons, and it's easy to see why. The half-back has been one of the best English rugby league players in recent times and has been a huge hit down under in the NRL, so there was plenty of hype surrounding the 30-year-old playing in the Super League for the first time. The race for Widdop's signature was so widely-run that it began way before preparations for 2019 even did, Wire finally securing their man in January 2019, with the player due to arrive in 2020.
Everyone would agree that Warrington's main problems last year were in the halves. Blake Austin started the season like a house on fire but only scored one try beyond 8th June and Declan Patton struggled massively all season and was the most obvious weak link in the side. Widdop was the man to fix that. He would come straight into Steve Price's team at number seven, partner Austin in the halves and help him regain his best form, and transform Wire's style of play and results. Widdop would be the catalyst for a resurgence and even if other areas of the team didn't especially strengthen, the arrival of the England international would be enough to carry the Wire team to a hugely improved season. It would also spell the end for Patton, who looked to be weighing up a move to rugby union, before seemingly accepting to be Austin and Widdop's backup.
Today's news means that - even if it is just for a short time - we will be starting 2020 with the same pair of half-backs that we finished 2019 with. Austin and Patton are almost certain to be starting at Wigan in Round One, which fills me with very little confidence. And now to something which hasn't been mentioned enough and something which Widdop's signing has managed to mask.
This squad has not been strengthened at all.
I'll address this in more depth in a full season preview piece in a few weeks, but just think about it. How many players have Warrington signed to go into the first team? It's two - Widdop and Anthony Gelling from Widnes. Widdop is now out for the start of the season, and Gelling is the replacement for Bryson Goodwin - certainly not an upgrade, in fact if anything, it's a downgrade. The signings of Matty Ashton, Keanan Brand and Samy Kibula are clearly intended for the reserves and the youth teams. So now that Widdop is injured, Warrington are starting the season with exactly the same squad as the one that won three of its last 13 games in 2019 - minus Goodwin, one of two good players in that period.
Glaring areas of weakness - the lack of a ball-playing centre, not enough bodies in the forward pack, no clear choice at loose forward - have not been at all addressed and now the one area that we had clearly strengthened in has gone too, for the time being. Couple this with Wigan and St Helens as the first two fixtures and you'd be hard pressed to not be at least a little fearful for the coming season. It's easy to say that there's no point of reading into the fixtures, and that 'everyone has to play everyone', but when you have a team like Warrington that are in the habit of going on long runs - either winning or losing - and it's a frightening start which, if the first two games go as you would expect, could well extend beyond just two rounds.
The Widdop signing was a masterstroke in terms of attractiveness - it felt pretty staggering that the Gareth Widdop was finally coming to Super League, and to Warrington. Marketing-wise, it was huge for the club and so much of the build-up to 2020 has centred around this man coming to the Halliwell Jones. However, there was always one niggling fear about the Widdop signing: injuries. The Englishman has had three shoulder reconstructions in as many years and has now sustained this ankle injury. There was also the mysterious knock that he picked up while on tour with Great Britain, though this cleared up quickly enough for him to begin pre-season training, before rolling his ankle this week during 2020 preparations. With this injury record in mind, was Widdop perhaps more of a gamble than we realised? Thinking about it now, maybe so. Perhaps we'd have been better going in for Jackson Hastings when his first Salford contract expired, or even better, could we have paid Castleford a fee for Jake Trueman? At only 20, Trueman would represent 10 years better value than Widdop and is well on course to be as good a player as him. Warrington are too reliant on injury-prone players - this is the second year in a row that Wire's starting number seven has got injured in pre-season. At least unlike Kevin Brown, Widdop isn't going to be out for the season. The immediate prognosis is that he will be scheduled to return around three weeks into the season.
What I will say though, is that given Widdop's injury record, I felt like it was almost a certainty that he would be out at some point this season - so it's not really affected my confidence in the sense that I'm no less confident than I already was prior to this morning's news. At the minute, he is forecast to miss the first three games and be back by Round Four (Toronto at home), though I expect it could be a few weeks longer than this initial prognosis. There is also a case to be made that if he is to miss any part of the campaign, it is surely better that it is the start rather than the end when it really matters and the prizes are given out?
My concern though, is that Wire might not have much to play for by then, barring mid-table mediocrity. Which, with every passing day, I am becoming more and more convinced of.
Daniel (@aloosewire)
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