#FridayThe13th - After the dust has settled...

After a week full of nerves and tension, the dust has now settled on #FridayThe13th. The outstanding issues have all been resolved and Super League will plough on to the play off series commencing on Thursday night.

The final day battle to avoid the drop needed London to take the lead or at least to be very close to Wakefield to truly ignite. As that never happened, the drama did not quite reach the fervent levels that many expected.

The requisite parts all fell into place. Salford and Hull KR played out a tight affair, with the lead frequently switching hands. The game eventually settled by an Inu golden point drop goal, where both sides would have known their fate before overtime commenced. We had the same back-and-forth at Huddersfield, who took an early lead before squandering it, and then fighting back to get the win that guaranteed their Super League status.

Wakefield had not read the fairy-tale script though. On a night with everything on the line, they played unencumbered from nerves with a professional and clinical performance against London. The game being over as a contest by the hour mark no doubt relaxed the tension felt by Hull KR and Huddersfield fans and players.

It could have been very different though. London missed a kickable penalty, had two tries correctly disallowed and Kieron Dixon was so close to getting another. In a game that ultimately finished three tries to two, these moments mattered.

London ultimately were the team to get relegated. Many of their players are reported to have signed Super League contracts for next year. Alex Walker and Jay Pitts are rumoured to be heading to Wakefield, but you would not have known it last night. Walker handled everything that Wakefield threw at him (and it was a lot!) and Pitts appeared understandably emotional in his post-match television interview.

In the first year of automatic relegation since 2014, what played out before us was unforeseeable at the start of the season. Everyone thought that London would be the whipping boys and there would be no such battle to avoid relegation. They finished with a record points tally for a bottom placed or relegated club in Super League and won over a third of their matches. Considering their budget and resources, it is still a season to be proud of even though it ended with the outcome that everyone expected.

I do not believe that complacency was the reason that so many sides found themselves under threat on the final day. In any other given season, 20 points would have been more than enough to avoid a relegation battle. Not in 2019. But what about 2020? If, as expected, Toronto are promoted to Super League for next year and spend big, avoiding relegation may prove an even tougher task for some clubs than it did this year. There may be even more sleepless nights in 2020.

A final word on the bottom clubs, and a rare word of praise for those who do not usually come in for it. Robert Hicks, in his first televised match since his poor display at Wembley, refereed the Wakefield vs London game superbly. He got the big calls correct and achieved what any referee wants to in a match, the perception that he wasn’t even there.

I thought that Sky Sports covered the match well too. The interspersed highlights of the other key games were welcome but were only shown in breaks in play of the feature game.

As the relegation battled petered out, focus moved further up the league table. With Castleford defeated at Wigan the previous night, Hull FC had the opportunity to secure the final play off spot by defeating St Helens at home. As the game progressed, St Helens started to pull away and with it, Hull FC’s season reached its conclusion.

The focus therefore moved slightly higher up the league table, to the race for 3^rd place. In the Super 8’s system, this would have been an irrelevance. Not this year though. Securing 3^rd place meant that there would be a second chance in the event of a defeat.

With Warrington losing convincingly at Leeds, the door opened for Salford, who were labouring at home to Hull KR. We will probably never know the impact that other results were having on this game. Did Hull KR ease off knowing that London were relegated? Were Salford galvanised knowing that a win would see them finish 3^rd? We don’t know. What we do know is that having five games kicking off at the same time added to the occasion and is essential in future years.

Salford secured the last-minute equaliser and with it 3^rd spot. It led to a bizarre golden point, in which both sides had secured what they had set out to achieve at the start of the evening, one way or another. This was not quite the drama of the last time the sides met in the final game of the season, and the match went to golden point…

And that was the night. A brave London were relegated, a heroic Salford secured 3^rd, Warrington dropped to 4^th and Castleford, by virtue of Hull FC’s loss, had the final play off spot.

Check back here throughout the course of the week, we’ll be posting our first “Eye on the Championship” blog on Monday and our Super League week 1 play off preview later in the week. Regular updates are on our Twitter page too @TheTrylineBlog.

Do of course leave any comments that you have too – what did you make of the final round of Super League?