So said De La Soul in their 1990 hip-hop monstrosity ‘3 is a magic number’. It’s an abysmal ear-worm of a ditty which you will now no doubt blame me for failing to get out of your head for the next three days, but the Long Island-based antidote to soul music had a point. Three is a significant number. Especially in rugby league, and especially for Saints in 2006. They don’t make intros like this anywhere else you know. This shit isn’t just thrown together.
Saints picked up all three major trophies on offer 13 years ago. That’s the League Leaders Shield, Challenge Cup and Super League Grand Final for the uninitiated. They lost just four times in 35 outings under shades-sporting Kiwi coach Daniel Anderson, who would later spend three years out of the game for his role in the Paramatta Eels salary cap jiggery-pokery. But back in 2006 it was all champagne and sunshine for Anderson at Saints, who were even named BBC Sports Team Of The Year at the annual Sports Personality bash. That is some achievement given that rugby league coverage at the event is usually restricted to one line from Clare Balding about Wigan.
On their way to winning the Challenge Cup, then sponsored by Powergen, Saints faced this week’s opponents Hull KR in the semi-final. Justin Morgan’s side were in the middle of a title winning season of their own as they were promoted from the then National League to take their place in Super League from the start of 2007. But on that day the gulf in class between Saints and their lower league opponents was enormous. The red vee produced an utterly dominant display, handing the Robins’ proverbials to them in front of a national television audience and around 13,000 fans in attendance at what was then called the Galpharm Stadium in Huddersfield. Saints ran in nine tries and racked up a half century of points without reply. This game might not have been as well contested as say….Lorraine Kelly’s tax bill, but it is one to remember for Saints fans nonetheless.
Despite their own good form Rovers might have known there was little down for them just by having a quick glance at Saints’ results coming into the meeting. Rovers lost only twice that year in the league, to Leigh and Whitehaven, but Anderson’s side started the season with 13 straight victories at the higher level. Twelve of those came in the Super League while the other was a 56-6 mauling of Doncaster in the fourth round of the Challenge Cup. Included in that run was a particularly satisfying 48-10 destruction of Wigan at Knowsley Road which saw Saints run in another eight tries. They didn’t lose until a 19-16 reverse to Huddersfield Giants at the Galpharm in early May. It would not prove to be a bogey ground.
Nevertheless Rovers had proved that they could mix it with Super League opposition when they dumped Warrington out of the Challenge Cup in the quarter-final. Morgan’s side won 40-36 at Craven Park with Byron Ford grabbing a hat-trick in Rovers’ eight-try performance. A Warrington side which featured Stuart Reardon, Margin Gleeson, Henry Fa’afili, Brent Grose, Richie Barnett and Chris Leikvoll were shovelling humble pie down their collective throats in quantities that would make even Jacob Rees-Mogg chunder ever so slightly. It would not be their year in the Challenge Cup for another three years, by which time none of those players were involved for the Wire.
That last eight victory made the rugby league world sit up and take notice of Rovers, who to that point had not faced Super League opposition during their cup run. They had taken on York City Knights, Hunslet Hawks and Featherstone Rovers on their way to that last eight tie with Warrington. That the road to Twickenham (Wembley was still in its rebuilding phase post 1999) did not end against Paul Cullen’s side had raised hopes that Rovers could be competitive in the semi-final. But Saints were not any old Super League opposition in 2006. If there had been a league above Super League then Anderson’s side would have been in it all by themselves.
Saints made a fast start to the last four tie. Just two minutes were on the clock when Keiron Cunningham took an offload from ex-Bradford Bull and human bowling-ball Paul Anderson and cut through the Rovers defence with ridiculous ease before handing on to Sean Long to do the rest. The Saints half hardly seems to be sprinting as he eases away from what cover Rovers could muster. It was a clear sign that these two sides were on vastly different levels even at that early stage of the game.
Francis Meli was next to thrust himself into the action. Six minutes in he met Rovers’ loose forward Tommy Gallagher with a shoulder that looked suspiciously head high. No doubt in these more enlightened times of player welfare the big winger might have been presented with a coloured card by referee Karl Kirkpatrick, but he was not even penalised on the day. Meli was a divisive character during his time at Saints. Error prone, he nevertheless managed 145 tries in 223 appearances for Saints between 2006 and 2013. This being his first year as a Saint perhaps he was a little too eager to make an impression at his new club when he hurtled into the unsuspecting Gallagher. Some fans couldn’t take to him and would blame him for everything from knock-ons and penalties to the political situation in Ukraine but if Meli played today he’d probably be a marquee player in the current Saints side. Bad players didn’t hold down regular slots in Anderson’s class of 2006.
Fourteen minutes in Saints stretched their lead. They had already gone close when Anderson just failed to ground the ball from Long’s kick but when the scrum half placed another pin-point grubber towards the Rovers posts Jon Wilkin made no mistake. The accuracy of Long’s kick is unerring as it lobs towards the goalpost and sits up perfectly for Wilkin to touch down. It’s one of the finest examples you’ll see of how Long developed from the pure runner who signed for the club from Widnes in 1997 into perhaps the most complete halfback that Super League has ever seen. It was almost unfair to have him at seven, Cunningham at nine, Leon Pryce at six, Jamie Lyon in the centres and a young James Graham in the back row. The salary cap has worked in terms of making Super League more competitive but it has robbed us of witnessing sides as good as this vintage. We may never see its like again.
Wilkin made it a double on 20 minutes, taking Jason Cayless’ offload to ease over for Saints third try of the afternoon. Daniel Powter sang about having a bad day in 2006 and Rovers were starting to understand what the Canadian crooner was talking about. Only a quarter of the game had passed and Morgan’s side were more or less out of the running for a place in the final. It was just a question of how many Saints would score. Vinnie Anderson was next to cross and, much like Meli, he was the beneficiary of the less fussy officiating of the time. Taking Cunningham’s pass he seemed to run around the back of Maurie Fa’asavalu who had been introduced from the bench. Rovers defenders of 2019 would no doubt have thrown their arms up in the air in outraged protest and had this one chalked off following the 32nd review. But just as these were less enlightened times in terms of health and safety they were light years ahead in terms of how to use video technology. It’s one of several areas of the game in which we seem to have regressed.
There’s also a collector’s item in these highlights. A mistake from Lyon. The former Parramatta and Manly man had two peerless years at Saints but here we see him finding the touchline with his pass instead of his wing man Ade Gardner. The look on Lyon’s face following the mistake is an amusing mixture of horror and disbelief. It was the kind of pass that he made routinely during his stint with Saints and it should have seen Gardner go under the posts untouched for what would have been Saints, fifth try of the first half hour.
Saints would have to settle for a 24-0 half-time lead then but Lyon was soon among the try-scorers. Even when he was slightly off colour you couldn’t keep the Australian centre out of the game, and so it proved when he took Long’s pass out wide on the right to glide through the Robins defence. Also involved in the movement was a young James Roby. He hadn’t yet reached his 21st birthday and was still seen very much as an understudy to Cunningham. His breakout year would come 12 months later when he picked up the Man Of Steel Award despite still playing mostly from the bench in relief of the Wales legend. Yet the fact that this team was so good that Roby could only occupy a spot on the bench boggles the mind. The term embarrassment of riches should have been coined for this lot who along with all the others already mentioned could call upon Paul Wellens and Willie Talau and had no less a figure than Lee Gilmour on the bench. Rovers stood about as much of a chance as the snakes on the plane once the windows were blown out in Samuel L Jackson’s frankly odd movie vehicle of 2006. Oops, spoiler alert….
No spoilers are required to work out what happened in the rest of this one-sided saga. The Galpharm continued to be a snake-pit for Morgan’s men. The rout continued thirteen minutes into the second half when Talau added his name to the scoresheet. The former Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs man took Pryce’s offload to squeeze his way over despite the attentions of a couple of Rovers defenders. It was his 35th try in 88 appearances to date and he would go on to play 149 times for Saints crossing for 65 tries before departing for a brief spell at Salford in 2009. For five years Talau was a mainstay of Saints left edge providing flair and power in attack and no small amount of steel in defence. It is arguable that we have not seen a better left-sided centre at the club since.
Saints led 34-0 then going into the last quarter, and it was Talau next across the line as he doubled his try tally for the day. Long’s looping pass out to Pryce is something to behold in this move while the final pass comes from Gilmour. Talau gets involved in a needless bout of handbags after scoring the try, taking exception to the attempts of Ben Cockayne to tackle him as he goes over. Yet if you are going to play at the level of intensity displayed by this remarkable Saints outfit then perhaps aggression will spill out a little too much now and again. It’s mostly push and shove and Cockayne’s part in it is no doubt the product of his frustration at being on the wrong end of such a fearful pasting. Rovers had not been used to this sort of treatment on their impressive march towards the National League title that year. The bullies of the National League were being bullied by the Super League’s very own Gripper Stebsons. Ask your dad. Think Simpsons bullies with perhaps even worse hair styling.
It was a touch surprising that Gardner hadn’t got over the try-line to this point but he put that right with less than 15 minutes left. Fa’asavlu caused 17 kinds of mayhem on the right hand edge before releasing Gardner down the right hand touchline. The ex-Barrow man, who notched 173 tries in 289 games for Saints between 2002 and 2014, danced down the touchline before just about grounding the ball as Ford made a late, desperate bid to stop him. It was a token effort. I used to know a lad who would play in goal in street games of football when we were kids. He would dive later than a Ben Westwood charge-down. That’s kind of what Ford’s effort to stop Gardner was like. Given that his side were already 40-0 down and the only dreams of Twickenham they now had were of watching the Six Nations on their televisions the following winter, you couldn’t criticise Ford too much.
The final word, the final insult for Rovers, came from Wellens. Roby was again involved before a dummy and a shimmy took Saints stand-out fullback through the bewildered Robins rear-guard for the ninth try of an almost faultless performance. It was the 100th try in a Saints shirt for Wellens and he did not stop there, collecting another 131 before retiring in 2015 just one game short of his 500th appearance for his home-town club. The year 2006 was peak Wellens. He carried off the Man Of Steel Award, crowning him the best player in Super League in a season which saw perhaps its greatest ever side take to the field and destroy everything in its path. Wellens would go on to win the Harry Sunderland Trophy for Man Of The Match in Saints’ Grand Final victory over Hull FC at the end of the season, but was pipped to the Lance Todd Trophy for Man Of The Match in the Challenge Cup final win over Huddersfield Giants by Long who collected his third Lance Todd Trophy in five years.
Saints’ frightening league form continued. They scored 128 points in their next two victories over Huddersfield and Castleford in the league, before a surprise loss in Perpignan to Catalans Dragons preceded the 42-12 Challenge Cup final success over Huddersfield. They finished the regular season with wins over Wakefield, Leeds and Warrington before defeating Hull FC twice in the old top six play-off system. They edged out Peter Sharp’s side 12-8 in the Qualifying Semi-Final before a more convincing 26-8 triumph in the Old Trafford Grand Final in which Cunningham, Gardner, Meli, Pryce and Talau all scored tries.
It would be nine years before Leeds Rhinos emulated Saints’ feat of winning all three of the League Leaders Shield, Challenge Cup and Grand Final in the same season. That year Leeds were outstanding also, but they lost six matches and had one draw in 29 fixtures, which is a somewhat less dominant set of results than that which Saints achieved in 2006.
De La Soul also sang ‘itszoweezee’. And for 80 minutes on a national stage against an out of its depth, sacrificial Rovers side, it was. Can Justin Holbrook’s class of 2019 inflict something similar on Tim Sheens’ side on Friday night?
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