Sam Tomkins has no room for sentimentality as Grand Final marks the end of a famous Wigan dynasty

Later this year, when the Wigan Warriors squad gather at Orrell for pre-season training, there will be a strange and empty feel to the place. The toss and churn of the off-season is a familiar rhythm to most Super League clubs these days, but even so, it’s hard to escape the sense that somehow, this will feel just that little bit different.

No longer will the corridors reverberate with the surround-sound bollocking-brogue of Shaun Wane, leaving after 30 years at the club as apprentice, player, scout and coach. John Bateman, their talismanic second row, will have departed for the Canberra Raiders. And for the first time in 15 years, there will be no Tomkins brother in the first-team squad. Logan and Joel have already gone; now, finally, middle brother Sam is flying the nest, bringing down the curtain on one of Wigan’s great rugby dynasties.

They’re all off on their travels: Wane to Scotland, where he is taking a part-time with the national rugby union team, Bateman to Australia, Tomkins to south-west France, where he will be making a new life with the Catalans Dragons. But before they all go their separate ways, there’s one last assignment to carry out: the Grand Final against Warrington on Saturday night, a chance to crown their respective careers under the Old Trafford lights.

Right at this moment, though, Tomkins is reminiscing. He’s thinking back over the journey he’s been on over the last decade or so, a journey in which Wane has been one of the principal characters: going right back to his teenage years, when Tomkins was a slight but gifted youngster determined to break into the game, and finding an equally determined character standing in his way.

“Shaun wouldn’t pick me,” he remembers now of his first brushes with Wane, who at the time was coaching the club’s under-18s. “Week after week, I would go in and ask him why I wasn’t playing. And he would give me a list of reasons as long as my arm. None of which I could argue with.”

He was 16 at the time, a first-year academy scholar at a crossroads in life. Unlike his older brother Joel, who had played for England at schoolboy level and been fast-tracked through the ranks, Sam had not been earmarked for greatness. The best academy prospects had been given retainer contracts worth around £3,000 a year. Sam, by contrast, was on a pay-as-you-play deal worth £25 a game, but only if they won.

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“Brilliant, when your car insurance is three grand a year,” he smiles. “Come the second year of the academy, they told me I could leave if I wanted. Even the £25 had gone. Widnes had offered me £3,000, and when you’re 16 or 17, three grand is a lot of money. I was thinking: I can get a car for a grand, insurance for a couple of grand. But my dad didn’t let me. He said: do you really want to play for Widnes? Is that what you dreamed of doing? I was like: no, probably not.”

And so Tomkins knuckled down in pursuit of a dream that seemed ever fainter, ever more distant. He turned down the offer from Widnes, stayed at Wigan and took a job as an apprentice greenkeeper at a local golf club to make ends meet. He borrowed £1,000 from his grandmother to buy a scooter to get him there, rising every morning at 5am to trim the fairways, dashing back home every afternoon for training at 4pm.

It was an exhausting life, and when he arrived at training, it would only get harder. “Shaun used to say my defence wasn’t good enough, my one-on-one contact wasn’t good enough,” Tomkins remembers. “I was about 60kg, so that’s probably why. So he got Ben Kavanagh [a burly prop now at Hull KR] to run at me on the try line. He ran at me 10 times and probably scored eleven tries. It wasn’t easy. But what Shaun instilled in me was the belief that if I kept trying, I might get there.”

He got there, all right. Eventually, as Tomkins put it, he “got a few lucky breaks and could stop cutting grass”. He bulked up, broke into the Wigan first-team where he took Super League by storm with his breathtaking running and genius changes of pace. He was signed for a world record fee by the New Zealand Warriors in 2014, returning two years later as a marquee player on a deal that was rumoured to make him the highest-paid player in Super League.

Tomkins’s return to Super League, however, has been more low-key. He struggled with injuries for two years, playing less than half of Wigan’s games in that time. And so when it came to taking up the option on Tomkins’s contract earlier this year, Wigan felt there were better uses for the money than on a 29-year-old with a history of knee problems. They offered him a generously renegotiated four-year deal; Tomkins, sensing a shift in the weather, decided to up sticks, selecting Catalans as much for reasons of lifestyle as for reasons of finance.

How’s his French? “Shite,” he replies. “I thought I’d finish my career at Wigan. Wigan is a family I’ve part of for a very long time. Next year will be the first without a Tomkins in the squad since 2004. I don’t think it’ll sink in until I’ve got a Catalans jersey on. When I’m in the south of France with – hopefully – a lot of fond memories.”

His four-year contract in France takes him well into his 30s. Who knows whether he will ever return? But then, rugby league is one of those sports that is instinctively suspicious of sentimentality, and even has Tomkins comes to the end of his time as a Warrior, there’s no room for mawkishness.

“The emotional stuff isn’t a huge motivator,” he says. “We’ve had 40 players this year. We’re not trying to win a trophy for players who are leaving. We’re trying to win a trophy for a group of lads who have worked really hard for 11 months.”