Three decades after being denied a place in the inaugural Super League and subsequently plunging to the brink of extinction, a mood of cautious optimism prevails at Keighley Cougars, a club that could be forgiven an uncomfortable sense of deja-vu.
A radical restructuring of the game in 1995 saw Cougars excluded from the top flight and hastened a painful decline into liquidation from which the club only began to emerge in 2019, following the return of chairman and owner Mick O’Neill, architect of the original wave of so-called ‘Cougarmania’.
