Meet the most miserable man at Murrayfield

Rarely have I seen anyone as disconsolate in defeat as Sean Long. At the final whistle, the St Helens scrum-half, normally the most ebullient of players, slumped to the ground, impervious to the attempts of his team-mates and the victorious Wigan players to buck him up.

He barely moved during the celebrations, before finally struggling to his feet, ostensibly to go and join his colleagues in thanking the Saints fans, but it was all too painful for him, so he found himself another patch of Murrayfield on which to collapse, and then another, as if looking for a piece of ground that would swallow him up.

Long clearly blamed himself for this surprising defeat and, in a sense, he was right. The three goals he missed, and the four his Wigan counterpart Andy Farrell scored, were the difference between the teams.

Also, had he not been collared by Kris Radlinski just before half-time, I am sure Saints' momentum would have been irresistible.

Even so, at two tries each and 12-8 down at the interval, the situation looked far from irretrievable. I bumped into Alex Murphy, a cheeky Saints international scrum-half of a previous generation, in the toilets at half-time - it is like that, the rugby league cup final - and he assured me that neither Saints fans nor those of us who had a financial interest in their retaining the trophy should worry too much.

All it needed, said Alex, was for Saints to start getting the rub of the green - a try by Cunningham on the half-hour, which would surely have turned the game Saints' way, was controversially ruled out on video evidence - and for the normally reliable Long to rediscover his kicking boots.

Admittedly, the shots Long missed were from wide out, but he has arguably had more practice at scoring that type of goal than anybody, thanks to the Saints propensity for moving the ball at speed to the wings.

This they did particularly effectively in a breathtaking semi-final victory over Leeds, when both wingers scored hat-tricks. Maybe Saints peaked in that semi, while Wigan's more laboured win over Castleford left them something to strive for at Murrayfield. It was difficult to disagree with the Warriors captain Andy Farrell's assessment that Wigan wanted victory more. That, more than Long's missed kicks, probably explained their triumph.

When Saints review the match this week, I expect Long will be less hard on himself. He played a major part in two of Saints' three tries, but every match tells a story, complete with heroes and villains - and if the undoubted hero was Radlinski, who made several crucial tackles as well as the one on Long before the break, a villain was needed, and Long unhesitatingly nominated himself.

It was not a classic final, but it was the most absorbing for years, and a good start for rugby league's new chief executive, Richard Lewis. Lewis, a former Davis Cup player, comes to the sport from the Lawn Tennis Association, and in an interview on Radio 5 Live on Saturday morning, he said there were similarities between lawn tennis types and rugby league followers, a view he might have had difficulty sustaining had he been in an upmarket restaurant in Edinburgh on Saturday night, when a Wigan fan dressed in a mini-kilt and a tartan tam o'shanter popped his head round the door and asked: "Do you do pie and peas?"

It is part of Lewis's job to attract sponsors and TV partners to rugby league in these difficult times. For the moment the game, with its cheerful family image, seems to have found the ideal bedfellow in Kellogg's Nutri-Grain.

In Edinburgh they were handing these cereal bars out to anyone who felt in need of nutriment, though it would have taken much more than a glorified flapjack, however vitamin-packed, to lift the inconsolable Long.

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