ONE empire falls, another rises. It was not hard to see the one in the ascendant as Leeds Rhinos gathered at the multi-columned Leeds Town Hall this week for a civic celebration of the team’s Super League and World Club Challenge successes. Carl Davis, the composer, is to write a triumphal fanfare, March of the Rhinos, and an artist-in-residence will shortly start work at the club.

The sleeping Leeds giant that occupied Wigan’s shadow for so long is not only fully awake, it is flexing its substantial muscles. Headingley will again be packed to its 21,000 capacity for tonight’s derby against Bradford Bulls as Leeds attempt to open a five-point gap at the top of the table — 20 points and eight places above Wigan, who, after their two heaviest defeats in the space of eight days, must avoid further embarrassment away to Leigh Centurions.

After Wigan’s 70-0 and 75-0 losses against Leeds and St Helens, Leigh’s legions walking over the Warriors and sucking them into the relegation mire would prove even more damaging for a club apparently in freefall. Wigan, once a byword for sporting excellence, resemble a sinking ship. Kris Radlinski is considering joining Andrew Farrell in rugby union and the new Gold Coast NRL franchise announced yesterday that they have snapped up Brian Carney, another of Wigan’s Great Britain players, from 2007.

For those who regard Wigan as principally a rugby league town, there was an interesting juxtaposition of stories in Monday’s Wigan Evening Post, one headlined “Drop Looms” and another about Dave Whelan, the owner of the rugby and football clubs, predicting that Wigan Athletic can use the platform of reaching the Barclays Premiership to qualify for Europe. It is ironic that the previously unheralded football club are on an unprecedented high as their rugby league counterparts are struggling more than at any time since their most recent relegation 25 years ago.

Five weeks into the coaching job, Ian Millward described it as his greatest personal challenge. Wigan’s proud record — although wrecked by Leeds, then St Helens in the Powergen Challenge Cup quarterfinals — hangs like a millstone around the necks of a doe-eyed generation of players. Millward cannot be blamed for the misfortune with injuries and a raft of departures that has forced him to plunder the academy and Under-21 teams. It has left some supporters pointing the finger at Maurice Lindsay, the chairman and principal architect of Wigan’s irresistible rise in the 1980s and 1990s from a state of financial collapse.

They were times when not only Leeds quivered in the face of Wigan, the only fully professional club at the time, who won the Challenge Cup eight times in succession, from 1988 to 1995, the league title six times and turned Ellery Hanley, Martin Offiah, Shaun Edwards and Andy Gregory into household names in the decade before the sport’s summer revolution. Such was their monopoly that rivals regarded it as unhealthy and hailed the arrival of full-time squads as the chance finally to compete at the same level.

Wigan’s fat chequebook was cut down to size by the salary cap, limiting their spending on players to £1.7 million a year and forcing the disposal of not only their most expensive personnel — Farrell’s £200,000-a-year contract took up a sizeable chunk of a squeezed budget — but youngsters of the calibre of Shaun Briscoe, now with Hull, and Luke Robinson and David Hodgson, who are at Salford City Reds, to comply with the 20/20 rule, whereby clubs can only pay 20 players £20,000 or more.

Having been approached to run Gold Coast in Australia, Lindsay, a critic of the spending restraints, could walk away, but 25 years after his last successful fight for the club’s future, “Mr Wigan” has vowed to stay on and help to restore a badly tarnished but still recoverable reputation, according to Millward, who sees a bright future with existing talent and next year’s recruits.

Leigh, restored to respectability by Millward before he moved to St Helens, would love to drag their neighbours down with them into National League One. It is a match that Wigan, three points off the relegation zone, dare not lose.

TOP TO BOTTOM

WEST INDIES

Trampled over England and the rest of the world through the 1970s and 1980s. Joel Garner, Malcolm Marshall and Andy Roberts launched a reign of terror with the ball and Viv Richards, Clive Lloyd and Gordon Greenidge with the bat, before Australia got the better of them in 1995; then it was downhill all the way. Pakistan, South Africa and New Zealand whitewashed them and even England got their revenge.

NOTTINGHAM FOREST

Brian Clough would send out his team saying: “Gentlemen, this a ball, now just go out there and pass it to each other.”
No team passed it better than Forest under Clough as Trevor Francis, John Robertson and Co won the European Cup in 1979 and 1980 and went on a 42-match unbeaten league run in 1977 and 1978. Life after Brian was never the same. Relegated last season to the third tier of English football for the first time in 54 years.

BATH

While Wigan were monopolising the league code in the latter part of the last century, Bath were doing likewise in rugby union. Won five league titles and the cup ten times between 1984 and 1996 as Jeremy Guscott, Stuart Barnes and Jon Callard ran riot, but even when they lifted the Heineken Cup in 1998, the edifice was crumbling. Flirted with relegation in recent seasons.