Lowes seeks grand finale to wind down long career
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Your support makes all the difference.More than any other role in a rugby league team, playing as a hooker and dummy half is a matter of making the right decision. Few have been better than James Lowes at knowing when to run, when to pass, even when to try a little kick – but now he faces the most difficult choice of his career.
Lowes will play for Bradford at St Helens on Saturday as the two strongest teams in the game try to get into the fast lane to the Super League Grand Final. It could be his last big match, because he has been mulling over the prospect of retirement. "I haven't decided yet," he says. "I'm going to see how the body feels at the end of the season. At the moment, I feel in good nick."
Lowes turns 33 next week and is clearly getting closer to the end of an illustrious playing career, but he says that it is not simply a case of him deciding to retire and the Bulls trying to talk him out of it.
"I've been talking to 'Nobby' [Brian Noble, the club's coach] quite a bit and he knows the situation, but I've never said to anybody that I'm packing in. Once I make my mind up, though, there would be no talking me out of it."
Lowes has the option of joining the coaching staff at the Bulls, a club where he has been an integral part of their success over the last seven seasons. The ideal scenario, to many minds, would be for him to carry on as a player for another year, grooming his successor at the same time.
It is an idea that appeals and, ironically, one of the young hookers Bradford would like to bring in will be on the opposing side on Saturday.
Mick Higham was signed by Saints as back-up for Keiron Cunningham, but has featured in every match this season. Lowes admits he is a player he would enjoy working with. "He's like Keiron in that he's very quick out of dummy half. The difference is that Keiron's got that upper-body strength."
With Higham still under contract and Saints unlikely to let him go, Bradford may instead sign Malcolm Alker, whose phenomenal work-rate in a relegated Salford side marked him out as a player who should not be lost to Super League. With his defence and support play, Alker just needs a bit of refinement at dummy half to be an international-class hooker. There is nobody better placed than Lowes to pass on the tricks of the trade and put himself out of a job as a player in the process.
First, though, there is the question of finishing this season on a high. Losing first place to St Helens means that he must face Cunningham on his home turf at Knowsley Road – and Lowes admits that he hopes it might be one of those nights when the Saints coach, Ian Millward, decides to experiment.
"I've seen him played at loose forward and at stand-off and, to me, he always looks a bit out of sorts out there. I know the idea is to freshen him up, but I don't really think he needs a lot of that."
The ideal finale for Lowes would be to win another Grand Final with Bradford and then force his way past Cunningham, Wigan's Terry Newton and possibly Higham or Alker into the Great Britain squad to play New Zealand next month.
"That might be a good time to bow out – like going out on a high after we beat Newcastle [in the World Club Challenge in February this year] would have been a good time. On the other hand, it might make me feel like going around again.
"At the moment, I'm feeling fine. They say you feel the bumps and bruises more the following morning when you get a bit older, but I've not really noticed that yet – certainly nothing like it was when I first switched to hooker at Leeds."
That conversion was one of Leeds' best ideas of recent years, just as letting him slip through the net has turned out to be one of the very worst since the day they told Brian Bevan they could not give him a trial.
What makes it worse is that Bradford have been the beneficiaries and the benefit could continue even after he hangs up his boots. If you were to try to read Jimmy Lowes' mind as he mulls over his decision, you would guess that he would have another year, that he would run with the ball for a while longer before passing it on to a younger pair of hands.
But the essence of his success has been that it has always been difficult to read his intentions. He could throw us all a dummy or two yet.
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