Connolly's sights set firmly on the future

One of the great modern careers ends tonight with a goal of denying series victory for New Zealand

If Gary Connolly were given to flights of fancy, he might visualise it like this: It is the last minute of his final Test match and the scores are tied.

Stacey Jones launches a high kick towards the sticks, swirling in the wind gusting around the JJB Stadium. Connolly leaps to pluck it out of the air and sprints a hundred yards to score his first Test try and win the match.

He is having none of it, though. "If I take the catch, that's good enough for me. The rest of it's a dream and I'm not a dreamer."

Connolly plays his 29th and last Test for Great Britain against New Zealand this evening – and almost certainly his last game of rugby league. At 31, he is being put out to grass – not quite, as one radio commentator put it, "out to stud" – at Orrell.

Who knows what he might yet achieve in union, where Ireland have already been courting him, but one of the great modern league careers ends today. There will be little visible sentiment, however. "I'm not a person to go round with a tear in my eye. I'll have a week off, then start training with Orrell," he said.

Connolly's initial contract with Wigan's union subsidiary is only for four months, but he considers it most unlikely that he will return to the parent club. "Wigan have got to make big cuts in the salary cap and that's the reason that players like me and David Furner are leaving," says Connolly, who also admits that the increasingly battered state of his body is another factor. Rugby union could add several seasons to his playing career.

For all that, Connolly has not looked during this series like a man who is weakening. Drafted into his old position of full-back, he has been a model of solidity at the back, raising the question of whether Wigan, Great Britain and rugby league in general can really afford to lose him.

"We do have a salary cap to comply with," says his Wigan chairman, Maurice Lindsay. "We really have no choice but to release some experienced players and bring the kids through.

"And, although Gary has been a marvellous player, his body has taken an incredible battering. I don't think he could get through another season. We have to preserve him."

It is no wonder that Connolly has taken more than his share of punishment. There has been little element of self-preservation in the way he plays the game and if, as the hardest tackler of his generation, he has inflicted plenty of punishment on the opposition, it has also told on his own, relatively lightweight frame.

"It's a miracle he's still playing," says Lindsay, but it is just as well for Great Britain that he is. With the regular full-backs, Kris Radlinski and Paul Wellens, both injured, his composure and durability have been even more vital in that role than they would have been in his usual position in the centres.

He prides himself on not having dropped a kick so far in the series and the statistics show that he has only missed a couple of tackles – and those when the damage was already done.

And yet there is still something missing. In a Test career stretching back to his debut against Papua New Guinea in 1991, he has still not scored a try. It is something he insists does not worry him a jot. "If I can play a part in Great Britain winning at the JJB and saving the series, I'll be perfectly happy. I've had a good Test career and I'd like to be remembered for what I've done, rather than what I've not."

Andy Farrell, his captain with Wigan and Great Britain, respectfully begs to differ. "Of course he cares about it. We rib him about it every day about it. But what he'll really remember is finishing his career with the right result," he says.

"He's been playing outstandingly, when you think that there was talk of him not being picked. He's got a new lease of life and, the way he's played the last two games, you wonder if we can afford to be without him."