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Fielden: Great Britain and Wigan prop
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Stuart Fielden's head and heart have taken so much punishment since he left Bradford in a world record transfer last summer that the verbal barrage he faced on his first return last Saturday really didn?t make much of a difference.
Knocked out by Willie Mason's infamous punch in Australia, the brutally honest Wigan prop spent the off-season beating himself up about his performance for Great Britain in the Tri-Nations Series before his old mate Lee Radford finished off the job in a charity boxing match.
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None of those blows, however, came close to having anything like the same impact as the death of his mother Marylyn last year.
She passed away on September 24, just two weeks before the Lions were due to go on tour, and 35 days after she was diagnosed with liver cancer. Fielden, 27, had hoped to pay for her and a friend to go to Australia, but it all happened too fast.
Her last wish was that her son should go ahead and play for his country. His brother Jamie, a former London Broncos forward, warned that Stuart "had still to come to terms with it in his head". Even now, Fielden isn?t sure he made the right decision.
"At the time I felt my head was right, and so did the coach Brian Noble," he said. "I still look back and think I felt fine to do it. I wasn?t talked into going, but I did speak to people.
"I spoke to my mum and it was something she wanted me to do. That?s when the prognosis was a lot better. After it all, what else was I going to do?
"It?s easy to say with hindsight I wish I hadn?t gone, but the only reason I would do that is because I played terribly. If I?d played really well, people might say it gave me the spirit.
"I didn?t go out there with my head in the clouds. I really thought I could make a difference, but I didn?t so there are no excuses."
Fielden does not need telling that his Tri-Nations performance was below-par for a player rated as one of the world?s best forwards. After all, he was the first to detect that he was stagnating after nearly a decade at Bradford.
"I wasn?t certain a change would make me feel any better but I had to try something," he said. "Even when Brian Noble was coach, I went and told him: 'I need to leave. It?s nothing to do with the club, the area or the team, I just feel really stale'."
Two months after his Great Britain and Bradford coach left the Bulls for Wigan, Fielden followed in a £450,000 deal ? topping the figure Wigan paid for Martin Offiah 15 years ago.
A big increase in salary was offset by the loss of a testimonial and the almost unthinkable prospect of Wigan crashing out of Super League. "It?s an understatement to say Bradford got a good deal," said Fielden. "It was the sale of the century, to be honest.
"I wasn?t prepared for Wigan going down. There was no contingency plan. We?d have crossed that bridge when we came to it."
The gamble paid off for player and club. A Fielden-inspired Wigan won 10 of their last 12 games to stay up, even though a relegation battle was foreign to a man who had played in the five previous Grand Finals and won the World Club Challenge three times with the Bulls.
It did not save him from the boos of the Bradford faithful on his first return to Odsal as a Wigan player last Saturday - "if you?re expecting it not to happen, you?re living in dreamland" - nor could his two tries rescue the Warriors from defeat.
It was their second in the opening three games, although Wigan will be confident of evening up the win-lose ratio at home to Super League newcomers Hull KR on Friday night.
By committing himself to Wigan until 2010, Fielden also gave up on an ambition to play in Australia?s NRL ? a move he claims will never happen now after the prospect was "soured by one of the worst times of my life".
Not only was he part of an under-achieving Great Britain squad as he struggled to come to terms with the death of his mother, Fielden also had to contend with the fall-out over the knockout punch from giant Aussie forward Mason.
It came during a rare highlight for the Lions, a 23-12 win in Sydney, and followed a brief exchange of words between the two players.
Fielden suffered a broken nose and was so concussed that his brother revealed: "He couldn?t remember much and thought mum was still with us ? the team had to tell him again."
Mason unsuccessfully pleaded self-defence at a disciplinary hearing. Fielden still laughs at the thought.
"I had a bit of a chuckle when I read the court documents," he said. "What his lawyer came out with equated to a 10-minute conversation between me and Mason, and him lashing out in fear of his life!"
Fielden was on the receiving end again earlier this month when he suffered a second-round stoppage against Hull forward Radford in a boxing bout that raised £50,000 for ex-Hull and St Helens favourite Steve Prescott who is suffering from stomach cancer.
"I was surprised at how easily the referee called it off,? he said. "I felt let down for the people there because they didn?t see the full four rounds." Fielden has always tried to give value for money. Perhaps the fans who booed him last weekend should remember that.
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