Rugby League: Bell determined to silence the doubters: Wigan's once-notorious captain has rejected club and country. Dave Hadfield assesses a decision-maker

THIS has been a season of momentous decisions for Dean Bell, who tomorrow captains the team he has decided to leave - Wigan - against the team he has decided not to rejoin - New Zealand.

Difficult choices, both of them. Trickier even than the question of whether to cut an opponent in half with one of the most feared legitimate tackles in the game, or to go a little higher and take man, ball and anything else at the scene in one destructive impact.

Bell has come a long way since he regularly walked such a fine line between legality and illegality. His old reputation is summed up by a story his coach at Wigan for four years, John Monie, used to tell about a disciplinary hearing he attended with Bell during his first season.

Monie gave the impassive panel the full spiel about what a model citizen Bell was, how helpful to young apprentices, how kind to children and animals. 'Thank you, Mr Monie,' he was told. 'You have spoken very eloquently in defence of your player, but we have been waiting for some time for Mr Bell. Ten matches. Next please.'

Bell is the first to acknowledge that maturity has wrought changes upon him. They still call him Mean Dean, but he now combines an icy discipline with his natural fire. He is also regarded as a pillar of society. Next month, he will become only the second rugby league player to be feted on This is Your Life.

Bell's life over the last few months has been problematic, however. First, he had to decide whether to accept Monie's invitation to go home to New Zealand as the first captain of the Auckland Warriors.

When they are launched into what is, with all due respect to the marathon slog of the English first division, the toughest rugby league competition in the world, Bell will be nearly 33, an age at which most Winfield Cup players have long since retired. Bell, though, believes he can defy conventional wisdom and his present Wigan coach, John Dorahy, agrees. 'It's the love of the game that keeps you going and Dean shows no signs of losing that,' he says.

It will still be a wrench to leave Wigan, his home for seven years and where for the last two he has proved an even more ideal captain than predecessors like Graeme West and Ellery Hanley. In fact, the decision was virtually made for him. Auckland needed an answer and Wigan, in their financially cautious mode, would not even talk about a new contract until the new year. In those circumstances, Bell had little choice but to say yes to the new challenge. He has no complaints, but there is surprise in the Bell household that even a club with an unsentimental record of letting the likes of Hanley, Andy Gregory and Steve Hampson go when they felt the time was right, should not have made a greater effort to keep him.

There are those in Wigan who will tell you that, as a result, Bell's heart is no longer in the club. His early season form has fallen below his normal standards and the terrace grumbles and the letters in local papers have suggested that a player who was a byword for commitment has lost interest.

'That's obviously people who don't know me,' he says. 'It's annoying, but it doesn't distract me. If anything, it makes me more determined to prove them wrong. I haven't been here for eight seasons to go out on that note.

'If you look at the team as a whole, we haven't been performing to our best. You could only pick out Kelvin Skerrett and Jason Robinson as showing any consistency. But that's the nature of the sport. You can't be on top of your game all the time and Wigan, for all the success we've had, have never done that.'

Wigan, who, it should be noted, have lost a grand total of one match so far this season, can use their game against the tourists to get back into their rhythm without the pressure of needing to gather league points, Bell says.

Had he wished, he could have been arriving tomorrow with one side and leaving with the other, but he has decided against an international comeback after four years in voluntary retirement.

Bell has no doubts about his ability to return, despite some barbed comments from the British Test players at Wigan about his form. Tongues firmly in cheek, some were telling him that they would rather face him than some of the other Kiwi centre candidates. You can imagine the Bell countenance cracking with mirth.

He has a number of reasons for resisting the temptation to turn the joke back on them. One is the need to concentrate on correcting any misconceptions about his approach to his last year at Wigan. Another is the feeling that New Zealand's need for him is not desperate. They have a choice of centres that would turn the Great Britain coach, Malcolm Reilly, green with envy; looking around British clubs, Dave Watson, Richie Blackmore, Kevin Iro and Craig Innes leap out, just for starters.

'If there was only me they could call on, I would think again. Not that I think of myself as the saviour, but it's still your country and, yes, it would be a different matter then.'

(Photograph omitted)