Steve Prescott Man Of Steel - Why It Had To Be Barba

That Saints Blog You Quite Like was going to take a break after the trauma of the semi-final defeat to Warrington. The Grand Final may be happening at the weekend but it is entirely dead to this writer, for whom picking a winner is like choosing which of the Hairy Bikers’ belly buttons you want to lick honey off. However, social media never lets me down when it comes to content ideas and so here we are back again, with another stream of consciousness rant cunningly disguised as a considered column.

Last night saw Ben Barba pick up the Steve Prescott Man Of Steel award. Contrary to its title, this award is not given to the player showing the kind of toughness or courage that was the hallmark of Prescott. Nobody could show that kind of courage on a rugby league field. Prescott was different gravy as a man and as an inspiration to everyone in the game and everyone who watched it. But the award that bears his name is given to the best player of any particular season. The most skilful, the most effective, the one who puts the bums on the seats. Barba was nominated alongside Saints team-mate James Roby and Wigan snarler and some time England centre John Bateman. Bafflingly, there is still some debate among the Twitterati about whether or not the Australian fullback should have taken the award.

It’s not that Roby or Bateman haven’t been good enough. They have been very, very good. Having watched Roby first hand week in week out I can assure you that he hasn’t had a bad game since he lost at table tennis in the games room of the England hotel during the last World Cup. He’s all action, tackles everything, makes breaks, leads, is inexhaustible and makes any side that he is in 20% better. I don’t see as much of Bateman as I do Roby and Barba but I am sure that he too has those same qualities. His stats will bear that out, seventh in metres made, second in carries, top of the pile in offloads. And that is throughout the whole league. His form has been good enough to convince Canberra Raiders to offer him a three-year deal in the NRL from 2019. And I expect him to be much more of a success than some of the other Wigan ‘stars’ that have tried their hand in Australia before heading home, tail firmly between legs.

Yet these two, for all their endeavour and excellence, cannot match what Barba has brought to Saints and to Super League in 2018. His detractors claim that he has only played half a season, and that defensively he isn’t very good. The first is the kind of schoolboy myth up there with the idea that the bigger boys shove your head down the toilet on your first day of secondary school, and the second just isn’t bloody relevant. You don’t buy a lawn mower to sweep the kitchen floor. When Barba arrived at Saints nobody was expecting him to save tries and be the defensive rock that Paul Wellens once was in the red vee. They were expecting him to go on those dizzying runs that we had all seen on the NRL highlight films, to score lots of tries and generally terrorise defences. Which he has done. He has scored 28 tries in his 29 appearances for Saints this year and added 24 assists. He has busted out of 141 tackles, a tally only Mark Percival can better, and has made 30 clean breaks. Along with coach Justin Holbrook Barba has revolutionised the way that Saints have approached the game after a stale few years.

Yet for all the stats it is the sheer joy that he has brought to fans inside the stadium that mark him out as a clear winner of the Steve Prescott Man Of Steel. He has made going to the game fun again at a time when we had become weary of the kind of five drives drivel served up by leading Super League sides over what is now getting on for a decade. His form hit a rough patch which coincided with the whole team falling into a sorry state just after the shock defeat to Catalans in the Challenge Cup semi-final. Saints form never really recovered from that jolt, and while Barba busied himself negotiating his exit and counting his money in front of the Hull FC fans there was a four or five game spell when it looked as though he had had enough and was just playing out time. Yet once the contract with North Queensland Cowboys was sorted he shot back into gear, destroying Warrington at the Halliwel Jones at the end of September and adding another double in a 26-0 shutout of Castleford a week later. The semi-final loss to Warrington was due more to some bewilderingly conservative tactics than it was to any loss of form on Barba’s part. Sure, you can throw a brickbat at him that he showed a less than exemplary attitude during his contract negotiations, but the length of time for which he was ordinary has been exaggerated greatly. And remember he was never that bad. Just ordinary. Human for a month.

The bottom line is that most right thinking rugby league fans don’t pay their hard earned money to watch uber-consistent grafters like Bateman, or even Roby now that the dynamism of his youth is on the wane. They pay to watch the players that can do something different, that can win a game on their own with one or two pieces of pure inspiration and magic. Barba did this consistently throughout the year, for a much longer period than the naysayers would have you believe as they darkly mutter that they knew he was a load of rubbish weeks before our season began to unravel at Bolton in early August. The absence of the big prizes might slightly taint the legacy of Barba if we are comparing him with great Saints imports of the past like Mal Meninga or Jamie Lyon. But it would have been an absolute travesty not to crown him the league’s best player for 2018 because one day we will all look back and remember fondly the year that we had Ben Barba in Super League.

We may not see a player like him in our competition for some time to come.