'We are the hollow men, the stuffed men...' wrote TS Eliot; and the poem aptly summed up the feelings of the Hornets faithful as they somehow found the wherewithal to applaud Hornets from Mount Pleasant's field after another truly awful defeat.

Indeed, the hollow feeling after a stuffing has become the staple emotion these last few months. And as the creak of the relegation trapdoor finally culminated in a clang, many of the fans who braved the trip to Batley were glad that the water-torture of this soul-sapping season was finally over.

The game was, itself, a microcosm of the season thus far. The first half was awful, with all the dynamism and animation of thickly painted anaglypta. The only respite came from a couple of woeful, windmilling scuffles (Hornets' Hasty and Batley's Gallagher sin-binned) and a Bulldogs try after half an hour, as Langley cut through to score. Maloney added the extras, both sides reverted to impotent jabbing and six-nil it was at the break.

Hornets began the second stanza by dropping the kick-off. And it was another dropped ball a minute later that gave Maloney the field position to send Stokes in for a simple try. And when Langley strolled through a series of flapping tackles on 52 minutes, the game - and Hornets fate - was sealed.

But, as we have seen often enough, once the game was effectively dead, Hornets shrugged off their torpor and played a little football. Just past the hour, a kick and chase opened up Batley's left flank and with Goulden, Marsh and Andrews all involved, it was Campbell who grabbed the touchdown.

But the revival was short-lived. A Maloney kick was tapped on by Toohey who capitalised on a static defence to score; then Lindsay was allowed space and time to pick a simple pass to Stenchion who cruised in by the posts. 30-6 and the damage done.

Two late Hornets efforts - McCully winning the race to touch down another kick through the Batley left channel and Hasty producing a jinking run way too late to make any difference - gave the scoreline a veneer of respectability.

As Hornets left the field to half-hearted applause and gritted teeth, the travelling fans were left to pick over the entrails of a year that stretched their faith to breaking point. And as the individual post-mortems began on the journey home, it seemed only fitting to close our NL1 account with a paraphrase of TS Eliot's closing lines: "... this is how the season ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper."