Rugby: McNamara adds substance to sales pitch

Tomorrow's Challenge Cup final provides the Bradford Bulls loose forward with a chance to fulfil high expectations, he tells Dave Hadfield

When the Bradford Bulls look back on what they have achieved over the past year or so, they have to keep reminding themselves that they have not, as yet, actually won anything.

Super League's acknowledged success story is still lacking its pay-off line and no one is more conscious of that fact than Steve McNamara, whose own year has been a mixture of excitement and frustration.

The former Hull loose- forward was signed too late to play in last season's Silk Cut Challenge Cup final and he then suffered the extra disappointment of being forced by injury to pull out of Great Britain's tour. Nobody feels more keenly the need to translate promise into fulfilment at Wembley tomorrow.

"We had a comparatively good season last time but we had the disappointment of not coming up with anything. If we don't win anything this time, there's a danger of us losing our momentum," he says. "The expectations of the crowd are so high. We have found out on occasions when we've won but not played particularly well this season that they expect so much from us every week."

That is the new challenge for the Bulls: making reality match their highly effective hype. As McNamara has found, the atmosphere that surrounds playing for Bradford is unique.

"I was lucky as a young supporter to be involved with Hull at a time when the atmosphere generated was just phenomenal," he recalls. "To come to a place like Bradford, which wasn't noted for big crowds, and see the way it has taken off has been tremendous. You couldn't wish to be at a better place at the moment. I couldn't imagine playing anywhere else."

After Odsal, anywhere else would certainly seem quiet and understated. The Bulls are the one club to go full bore for the new opportunities presented by summer rugby and the one - with the honourable exception of their Cup final opponents - to have made an unqualified success of Super League's brave new world.

Match day at what was once a gloomy, depressing venue is now an all-singing, all-dancing experience - a million miles away from watching the team they used to call Northern or the Steam Pigs slogging through the fog.

It is brash, raucous, colourful and often pretty crass - and it works. Bradford more than doubled their average gate last season to displace Wigan as the game's best-supported club and all their home League matches so far this season have attracted wildly enthusiastic five-figure crowds.

They are clearly doing something right, but where McNamara parts company from the marketing gurus is in his instinctive understanding that there must be a pay-off if the mood is to be sustained.

That is why the Bulls must win at Wembley: to add substance to the sales pitch. Fortunately, there is plenty of substance there - not least in the players they have added to their side since they lost there to Saints 12 months ago.

Apart from McNamara, Bradford have acquired Stuart Spruce, Danny Peacock, Glen Tomlinson, James Lowes and Tahi Reihana for this year's Cup final squad.

"There's no doubt that we're a stronger team," he says. "It was frustrating sitting out the final last year, but I knew from the time I signed that that was going to happen. It would have been worse to be injured or dropped.

"Obviously, it's nice for me to have the chance to go back and get my chance this time. The one doubt I had was whether the players who played there last year would have the same desire for this one. But, if anything, they've got even more hunger for it than I have."

McNamara's own hunger is sharpened by what he calls "the most devastating thing that has happened to me". An automatic choice for the Lions' tour to the South Pacific, he had to withdraw with a badly gashed hand.

Although it was little consolation to him at the time, the nature of the accident says a good deal about a young player who keeps closely in touch with his own - and rugby league's - roots. He was carrying a crate of drinks for his old amateur club, surely a better way of acquiring a war wound than tripping up at a photo-shoot or dropping your Filofax on your foot.