My career highlight was followed by my biggest disappointment – Luke Gale

I’ve only played five times for Leeds so it is a Castleford match, but – for Rhinos fans – I’ll also reveal my biggest disappointment.

I don’t think either will shock anybody.

The highlight of my career, so far anyway, was the play-offs semi-final against St Helens in 2017.

That was an emotional and memorable night for a lot of reasons.

Almost two weeks before it, I got appendicitis. I was actually on my way to meet my agent, Craig Harrison, and I had to turn back because my stomach was in bits.

A few hours later I was sent to hospital and they told me it was appendicitis. The first thing I said was: “I’ve got a semi-final in two weeks’ time.” The doctor was quite abrupt; he said: “You can forget about that, you won’t be playing.”

We had finished top of the table and been flying all year and it seemed like I was going to miss the most important game, or games.

They removed my appendix and the specialist’s comment was “I wouldn’t advise it”, but I was always going to play.

I actually rang Jamie Peacock the week before and told him the situation; I’d had my appendix out, the doctors were telling me not to play, but I was pretty sure I was going to give it a go.

JP’s a tough character and he talks sense. He told me: “If you are going to play, don’t just play and go through the motions and just be on the pitch – you have to make a difference for your team.”

He said he’d seen a lot of people play through injury, but they were just there, they weren’t really playing. I thought they were great words and very JP-esque.

I didn’t train before the game and, at the captain’s run, the day before, I asked Grant Millington to run at me as hard as he could.

I said: “I’ll do one tackle off each shoulder and, if I stop you, I’m playing.” I did a tackle off each shoulder and it was sweet, so that was it, I was in. The game itself was strange. We started off well, but Saints were two points up at half-time.

In the second half I scored a try as we went 10 points ahead and we were in cruise control, but, all of a sudden, they got a roll on and Saints are hard to stop when they do that.

They got a late try to go two points up, but we got a penalty on the last play and I kicked it to send it into extra-time. Golden-point made it the game it was; there were a couple of missed drop goals and I had one that didn’t go over.

The first one was quite a nice strike and I only just missed and that kind of gave me confidence. Sometimes if you miss your first one you are a bit reluctant to take the second, but I had no doubt I’d nail it if I got another chance.

It was one of those where as soon as you kick it, you know. I just turned around and went sprinting down the field. Zak Hardaker tried to tackle me and all the other boys piled on, which wasn’t great for a bloke who had just had stitches in his stomach.

For the emotion, to go from not playing to kicking the winning drop-goal, that was my career highlight.

Then we played Leeds in the final and that evening is definitely my biggest disappointment. It was Cas’ and my first Grand Final, it was against my hometown team and we had beaten them four times that year.

What could go wrong?

Leeds went into the Grand Final and did what they do best and my mate, Danny McGuire, had probably one of the best games of his career. What a swansong.

I thought it was written in the stars for us, but it was written in the stars for Leeds and Magsy. We lost Zak which didn’t help, we jigged our team about and had two early disallowed tries.

It was one of those nights, we had 19 errors and Leeds played the conditions better than us. They’d been there and done it and we were trying to do it our way, how we had played all year.

If I had my time again, I’d play it a lot different to what I did then.

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