EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE: Cougars of Keighley

One of the very few of that type I failed to put any faith in was myself, so I got one right.

Otherwise, be it sports teams, bands, other people, career choices, I’ve almost always got it wrong.

Giving yourself some credit is a good place to start in life, but I was always taught — or choose to believe I was — to expect the worst and anything else is, in sporting parlance, a bonus.

That’s what I did and mostly it didn’t appear to be a bad policy. I was very rarely disappointed.

Or maybe I have been permanently disappointed because I didn’t give it a real go, didn’t realise what could be achieved, through either lack of ambition, lack of confidence, fear of failure or general apathy towards a world in which, whatever you do to try to make it better, will defeat you with its determination to go the other way.

We live in a time in which successful people include the likes of tax-avoiding hypocrite Gary Barlow (don’t appear on Children in Need telling me to donate when you’ve funnelled your own millions elsewhere son), smug unfunny Michael McIntyre (surely a plant to ensure real comedians aren’t given a voice on a sanitised national TV), Jimmy Savile (really, you didn’t know? Or even suspect?) and Boris Johnson (where do I even start?).

Sometimes though, just occasionally your faith in the underdog is repaid — so a round of applause for the mighty Keighley Cougars.

Poor old Keighley have barely won a thing since their founding in 1876, though they did reach the Challenge Cup final in 1937, losing to Widnes.

I started watching them in about 1980 and witnessed many a thrashing, including a 110-0 reserve team defeat at the hands of Leeds, when the Cougars were simply Keighley.

I got soaked everywhere from Whitehaven to Runcorn and Trafford to Featherstone in support of a team that, as well as having no money, were dogged by bad luck. I knew the feeling. I could relate to them. I think that was what hooked me in.

I had moved away from Yorkshire by the time they did start to win leagues and even then the powers that be reorganised the sport (thanks Rupert Murdoch and Sky) and the Cougars were denied their rights to promotion.

Administration followed, a winding-up order, a decrepit  run-down ground, the worst results in 40 years and a crowd barely in the hundreds unable to greet the team with a miaow of support, never mind the roar of a cougar.

So low was the team’s recognition that to most a Keighley cougar was something else altogether (I nicked that line off a colleague!).

That is until now. On Sunday the Cougars became record breakers by completing an entire season undefeated. Twenty games, 20 victories, 989 points scored, only 194 conceded. Promotion to the Championship (the rugby league equivalent of Rotherham United’s status) secured — unless another reorganisation keeps them down.

There’s pride in backing those who don’t always win, you know. It’s easy to get behind those with money, those with backing, clout, the support of the system.

The success of the Cougars this year is about much more than sport — it says we can reach the lowest ebb and still come out the other side.

Former player Paul Moses, one of the best of the ‘90s, was in the second division championship winning side of 1995 and he was also there when it all came crashing down the following year, playing in a 92-2 defeat at Leigh, of which he quite rightly says: “I was there to be counted.”

He was — and being there through the hard times makes the good ones better. Some people wouldn’t know that.