2013 Super Bennie Westwood Testimonial Brochure

DAVE HADFIELD
There was a malicious rumour that
went around at the time, alleging that
Warrington had signed Ben Westwood
by mistake.
He had been part at Wakefield of what
looks with hindsight like a jaw-dropping
centre pairing with Gareth Ellis.
When it was Ellis who made the more
rapid progress, there was a theory that
the Wolves had recruited the wrong
man.
With all due respect to Gareth – who
will no doubt show his continuing
excellence at Hull next season –
there’s no-one at Warrington quibbling
about the deal now.
If there has been a bigger
favourite at the club over
the last 20 years, I must
have missed him.
There is no danger of missing how
important he has been to the side. I’ve
never known a player to be praised to
the skies after almost every match the
way Bennie is by Tony Smith.
Not that he doesn’t deserve it, but you
get embarrassed for him on occasion.
My opinion of him soared even higher
on the trip to play France a couple of
years ago. Waiting for the flight back
from Avignon, he was the one who
ensured that the entire media party
had all the take-away pizza they could
eat.
There had been a bit of confusion with
French numbers, so dozens of pizzas
had been delivered to the departure
lounge. He saw to it that flight crew,
ground crew, customs officers and the
rest all got fed.
That’s class for you and that’s rugby
league.
ANDY WILSON
Who could honestly say they identified Ben
Westwood as a future superstar of the
Super League in his early days with
Wakefield and Warrington? He was a
sufficiently promising centre for the Wolves
to target him, with Nathan Wood, as two
key signings in their desperate battle
against relegation back in 2002. But his
development into a second-row tough and
good enough to command respect from
Australia and New Zealand at international
level - as well as kicking the odd handy
goal - has been an admirable story of hard
graft, with the odd bit of daftness thrown in.
That daftness made the young lad from
Normanton a good fit with his first coach
at Wakefield, the eccentric Australian John
Harbin. Harbin was in charge when
Westwood first made his impact on the
Wire, at Belle Vue in July 2001 when he
was sin-binned by a young Richard
Silverwood for fighting with Alan Hunte
and Toa Kohe-Love in a 19-18 Warrington
win- in Darryl Van de Velde’s last game
in charge. “If I controlled my kids the way
Silverwood controlled the game, I’d be in
trouble.” Harbin said afterwards - he was
always good for a quote, and even a beer
after Wakefield had avoided relegation on
the last day of that 2001 season at Salford,
and the Queenslander brought a crate of
XXXX into his post-match press
conference.
But it was David Plange who made the
move for Westwood and Wood in the
summer of 2002, with the funds provided
by a chap called Simon Moran, shortly
after he had made a typically low-profile
move on to the Warrington board. Those
were the days when the Guardian - the
one that used to be called the Manchester
Guardian before decamping to London, not
the proper one here in Warrington - used to
cover rugby league properly. We even had
Peter Roe, the no-no sense Yorkshireman
who had succeeded Harbin as Wakefield’s
coach, doing a weekly column, and as his
ghostwriter it was through his eyes that I
viewed the Westwood move.
Roe referred to the off-field shenanigans
as “the seedy side of the game” after
Wakefield had suffered a 24-12 defeat at
Wilderspool in the immediate aftermath of
the double deal, even though Wood and
Westwood were prevented from making
their Wire debuts against their former club.
“Wakefield has always been a family club,
and losing Ben had a huge effect on his
colleagues,” Roe reflected when I
contacted him for this piece. “In many ways
that’s
a tribute to how influential he had become
in a fairly short space of time. So it did
leave a bad taste at the time, but I’m happy
it’s proved to be the right move for Ben and
worked out so well for him.
“It’s fair to say he had a few rough edges
when he started out with us at Wakefield,
and a few problems off the field. I think
having to travel across to Warrington was a
big help because it forced him to sort out
his attitude to training and timekeeping -
living so close to Wakefield in Normanton,
it had never really mattered if he was five
minutes late.”
While on the subject of Westwood and his
coaches, this seems like the right forum to
make an official apology to Tony Smith for
causing a little disharmony in the
Warrington dressing room at some stage
last season. I can’t remember the exact
details, but I’d wondered aloud in the
column I used to do for League Weekly
why Smith was so fulsome in his praise for
Westwood after a game in which the other
Ben in the Wolves pack, Harrison, had
excelled.
It’s always a shock when you discover that
people read your stuff, let alone take notice
of it, so I’d never dreamed this could cause
any bother. But it left our beneficiary in
danger of being labelled a teacher’s
pet - not something that can have
happened often in his career. Anyway
coach Smith has reminded me of it at
regular intervals since, usually looking my
way when he praises a non-stop
Westwood performance in a
post-match press conference - which he
tends to do most weeks, without any hint
of favouritism.
That says everything about
Ben’s courage, consistency
and durability - qualities that
would have made him a
genuine Man of Steel
contender in each of the last
three seasons had journalists
still been involved in the
judging process.
Congratulations on a terrific career.
PAGE 26 SUPER BENNIE WESTWOOD TESTIMONIAL 2012
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