Hunte & Sullivan Destroy Cas - 1994

Saints made a disastrous start to the 1994/95 season. Eric Hughes’ side went down to a 20-29 home defeat to a Doncaster side inspired by future Saints cult hero Vila Mata’utia. It was a miserable result on a balmy August afternoon. Saints followed that disappointment with a 31-10 reverse at Warrington a few days later, when Mark Forster grabbed a hat-trick and Jonathan Davies scored 11 points with the boot.

So with their title challenge already faltering Saints needed a spark. A win at Halifax got them off the mark for the campaign, before Salford were narrowly edged out 34-28 at Knowsley Road. Next came a trip to Cumbria, Saints winning 30-25 against Workington Town at Derwent Park thanks to an Ian Pickavance try-double and 10 points from Bobbie Goulding.

By the time Castleford arrived in mid-September there was hope rather than expectation that title hopes could be revived. The losses had been painful and even the wins had been a little scrappy and less than convincing. It wasn’t until the arrival of John Joyner’s Cas side that Saints really showed their attacking prowess. Joyner’s men arrived at Knowsley Road unbeaten. All of Widnes, Workington, Hull FC and Sheffield Eagles had been vanquished as the Wheldon Road side set the early pace alongside perennial title favourites Wigan. Eighty minutes in the St Helens sunshine was all it took to have the Yorkshire side hastily re-assessing their prospects for the season.

This column consistently bemoans the lack of old fashioned wing play in the modern game. Too many sides employ battering rams on the flanks whose main role is to get their team out of their own end of the field. They still score a volume of tries but today’s wingers tend to do so once good field position has been established. They are less of a threat from deep than the early 90s wingers of my mind’s eye. This match was a perfect example of the damage that could be caused by genuine flyers out wide.

One such flyer, Anthony Sullivan, had somehow not managed to score a single try in any of the matches leading into this Castleford clash. In fact it had been a sluggish star to what turned out to be a glorious Saints career for the Welshman. Having arrived in the 1991/92 season Sullivan didn’t get into double figures for a campaign until 1993/94 when he crossed 20 times. By the time of his departure from Saints in 2001 he had scored 235 four-pointers for the red vee and was widely regarded as one of the greats of his era. The three he scored in this game were an indication of why Sullivan would go on to be held in such high esteem. The combination of speed, balance and poise was breath-taking and something you so rarely see in today’s more robotic Super League.

On the opposite wing Alan Hunte had crossed five times before this one and would almost double that tally by the end of a vintage Saints performance. It was Hunte who went over first, taking Goulding’s pass to tiptoe down the touchline to open the scoring. At around 3 minutes 10 of the clip you can see how Goulding had created the space by running across the face of the Castleford defence, committing defenders before firing a quick pass out to Hunte. Arriving from Widnes earlier in 1994 Goulding would eventually prove one of the catalysts for Saints march towards a first league crown in 21 years in 1996 when they also went on to win the Challenge Cup.

It wasn’t until the stroke of half-time that Sullivan opened his try-scoring account for the season. A grubber kick towards the Saints in-goal area was expertly scooped up by fullback Steve Prescott, who jinked, hopped and stepped away from his own line before unloading a quite sublime flicked pass to Sullivan on his inside (around 6 mins 35 into the clip). It was over before Sullivan even crossed the half-way line, the amber shirts floundering in pursuit of Saints elegant number 5. By the time he crossed the try-line Sullivan was able to dot the ball down with the utmost nonchalance.

Which is a good word to describe how Saints dealt with Castleford the rest of the way. The home side were a different outfit in the second half, and their wide men caused seven kinds of havoc as they ripped the visiting defence apart. Sullivan’s try close to the break had given Saints a fairly slender 15-8 half-time advantage, but within four minutes of the restart Saints were over again. Chris Joynt was halted on the left hand side and as the ball was switched to Goulding by hooker Sean Casey the halfback placed a picture-perfect cross-field kick into the space ahead of Hunte on the opposite side of the field. Hunte got there ahead of his opposite number Simon Middleton and slid over to put Saints in total command of the game at 19-8 (8 minutes in).

Just before the hour Hunte’s hat-trick arrived (8.36). It was a messy affair, but highlighted the opportunistic skills of the former Wakefield man. Richard Goddard had been introduced from the Castleford bench but soon found himself in a comical tangle after Scott Gibbs’ attempted pass over the top towards Hunte went to ground. In trying to pick the ball up Goddard could only succeed in kicking it towards his own try-line in the manner of an old man letting his grandchildren win in a back garden game. Goddard performed this unlikely trick twice, allowing the ball to roll over the try-line for a grateful Hunte to grab his third try of the afternoon. He wasn’t done there.

Five minutes later, from a scrum on Saints own 20-metre line they were at it again (9 mins 30). Goulding ran at the defence once more, drawing men to him before handing on to Shane Cooper who moved the ball on to Prescott. Going through the gears, Prescott was leaving opponents standing before deciding that actually the quickest way to the try-line was to hand on to the supporting Sullivan. Ball tucked, bolt-upright and with a peerless running style Sullivan made light of racing away from the cover as Tawera Nikau and Graham Steadman gave a forlorn chase. Steadman’s desperate attempt to tap the ankles of Sullivan as he gets close to the try-line just gives the thing an even greater aesthetic pleasure. A try you could watch over and over and wonder why they don’t make them like this any more.

Casey was making a rare appearance for Saints. He managed just 14 games for the club between 1990 and 1994. Here he was deputising for the second game running for a young Keiron Cunningham. The latter, and even today’s great number nine James Roby would have been proud of Casey’s involvement in Sullivan’s hat-trick try. Scooting out from dummy half on the left hand side of the field Casey held off three Cas defenders before freeing an arm to slip the pass to Sullivan who crossed for the easiest of his three tries on the day (10 minutes 21). It was a dazzling piece of skill from Casey, and exactly the sort of thing that Saints fans would come to take for granted from the likes of Cunningham and Roby over the next quarter of a century.

From the ensuing kick-off (11 minutes 15) Goulding set Hunte free once more down the right hands side and though his gallop down the touchline came to an end before he could cross for a fourth (that would have to wait), Hunte did had done enough to set up the position for Goulding to work a little more of his magic. Faking a pass out to the left where much of the space was, Goulding stepped back inside and found Gibbs who went over untouched to put Saints 39-8 up. Goulding’s conversion saw Saints break the 40-point barrier, the halfback dropping to his knees in mock-unworthiness of the by now delighted home suport.

There was still time for Hunte to have the last word, latching on to a loose pass deep inside Castleford territory to earn a simple walk-in for his fourth of the match, and his ninth of that season by that point (13 minutes 40). After a tense first half Saints had run out 47-14 winners with the kind of display that the term 'champagne rugby' was invented for.

Unfortunately there were not too many reasons to pop the cork on the champagne bottle during the rest of 1994/95. Inconsistency plagued Hughes' side, who could only manage an 18-18 draw at Oldham a fortnight after this win and would go on to lose a further seven times in the league. They finished fourth, which was a place behind Castleford as it happened, as Wigan went on to claim yet another crown. Leeds finished runners up but they were a distant seven points behind the Central Park outfit for whom Martin Offiah scored a quite ridiculous 53 tries and Frano Botica kicked his way to 408 points.

Barely two years later Hughes was gone, replaced by Shaun McRae as the Australian went about the business of delivering that first title in almost a quarter of a century. Sullivan and Hunte would remain integral parts of that team in 1996, as would Goulding, Gibbs, Prescott and Joynt. Others moved on, Casey replaced by the indomitable Cunningham while Paul Loughlin and Sonny Nickle were makeweights in the deal which brought Paul Newlove to Knowsley Road. Bernard Dwyer also headed to Bradford in that deal. The kind of rugby we had been given a glimpse of in this win over Castleford became a more regular occurrence as Saints finally broke the domination of their local rivals from over the lump.