After reporting on Salford defeating Wakefield 16-12 in the last regular Super League game of the season, I caught up with one of the games gentlemen in Jason Demetriou and the popular Aussie, a fixture at Belle Vue since 2004, spoke fondly of his time with the club and hopes for the future.
"Today was a bad day but I've finished after seven good years at Wakefield and had three good years at Widnes as well. I've had a great career and there's no regrets from me. I would have liked the club to have done better, from where we were last year to where we are now this year, we've probably gone back four or five years, which is a shame."
"When I came to the club we were fighting relegation every year. We then made the play-offs in 04, 07 and 09, and the Challenge Cup Semi-Finals in 08. We had that top five finish last year. Unfortunately it has slipped backwards.
"There have definitely been some really tough times and as captain I've had to do my bit to help the club though those times but I must credit Ted and Diane and the club's administration staff because they have done a good job as well as John Kear and Paul Broadbent who have copped a lot of stick this year.
"When you look at the players we were attracting l;ast year to the quality of players we are attracting now. It's not good and there's a lot of doubt about whether we'll get a franchise or not. That's not helping. I do know that within the club they are very confident of that but outside the club it's not so confident."
"We had a great start and Brough was a good player, no doubt about that but he wanted to leave and the club cashed in on him but it's not just that. We had what happened with Terry Newton as well - a Great Britain international and a quality player in the middle of the field, Shane Tronc left, we lost James Stosic in the off season. It's been one really experienced player after another and we've been forced to play with younger players and credit to them, they've done a good job, but we are in a massive hole now and I said to the players after the game there that they are going to have to come back with a really good attitude and work really hard in the pre-season. If they do that I'm sure they will get back to where they were.
"I'd definitely like to do the coaching. I've been passionate about coaching for a long time and I've worked with a lot of young players at Wakefield. Ideally I'd like to stay and do some coaching. I'll sit down and speak with John and Beans (Broadbent) and maybe we can thrash something out there, I don't know. I've got a couple of meetings in the pipeline about player-coaching in the championship but it's something I'm definitely interested in and I think I can add a lot to the squad from a coaching point of view."
"Unfortunatley today I hurt my ankle in the first ten minutes and was limping around for most of the game and I nearly put Blanch away in the last couple of seconds. I could have been a hero but that was the story of the game really, we dropped the ball and we didn't quite get that end we wanted, but even today there were four possibly five hundred fans and the reception I got at the end of the game was overwhelming and I want to pass on a massive thanks to all the Wakefield fans."
I'm sure Wildcats fans everywhere will wish Jason well with whatever he does next.
In other Wakefield news, John Kear speaking after the game said that the Wildcats would return to pre-season training ahead of 2011 on 11th October.
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