You can never be unhappy with a derby win. Not when the opposition has a big, fat duck egg next to their name and your team has ran in seven great tries. Not when it is a win that takes your team clear at the top of 2020s win percentage based Super League table. Still, as with most things that have come to pass in this absolute annus horribilis, this was not a derby that will be remembered as a classic of the genre.
There was something missing, and not just the fans inside Salford’s AJ Bell Stadium. This could have been the fixture which launched the piloting of a return to stadia for fans but that idea fell by the wayside last week when paternity-dodging, fridge-dwelling Prime Minister Boris Johnson pulled the plug due to rising coronavirus infections.
Yet perhaps Johnson’s decision wasn’t all that damaging. This was never going to be a great fan experience right from the moment that the authorities saw fit to schedule it just a few days before the Challenge Cup semi-finals. It had always been the plan to play it midweek before the cup’s last four ties at the weekend. Johnson’s ban on fans just allowed it to be moved forward from Wednesday to Tuesday to give Wigan a little more time to prepare for their meeting with Leeds Rhinos.
They needn’t have bothered. An extra 24 hours preparation wasn’t enough to convince Wigan coach Adrian Lam that he should field a truly competitive team. And it is hard to find fault with that decision. Comparisons have been made between Lam’s selection and the one by Ian Millward which saw Saints fined £25,000 for fielding a weakened side against Bradford Bulls in 2002 ahead of that year’s Challenge Cup final. Much good it did us but that is a whole other blog. One that involves me sitting in the Springfield refusing to look at the big screen while simultaneously being unable to look away for a good 30 minutes.
Yet for me comparisons between Lam’s selection and Millward’s of 18 years ago are wide of the mark. The 2020 season is a campaign like no other. Were it not for the reliance on the broadcast revenue it is highly questionable whether as much effort would have been made to complete the season at all. The same people who have been telling us that results don’t matter this year and that the priority is getting through the year unscathed are now the ones suggesting that Wigan have committed some sort of crime against sporting integrity.
It’s a red herring. Even if you buy into the idea that results matter this year as much as any other year there is still sound logic in Lam’s choice. I’m sure he thinks it would be nice to win the League Leaders Shield but in a year when neutral grounds are very much to the fore there is very little benefit in doing so in terms of increasing your title hopes. You may as well finish fourth as first if the semi final is going to be on neutral territory. So are you going to jeopardise a shot at reaching the final of the Challenge Cup for a shot at the League Leaders Shield? Not unless they get rid of the playoffs you’re not. Defenders of the Grand Final concept can’t have it both ways.
So this game was over as a contest when the squads were announced 48 hours prior to kick-off. Not that the prospect of a one-sided game stopped the RL press from getting very giddy about the young players who made it into Lam’s match day 17. It was, they said, a glowing endorsement of their youth set-up and everyone involved should give themselves a big, LMS-style pat on the arse. Which is kind of true. It’s a very proud moment for youth coaches when their charges get on to a Super League field. But to praise Wigan so highly for this was to forget that there were no less than nine academy graduates in the Saints line-up also. Two more missed out through injury and suspension in Mark Percival and Tommy Makinson while yet another was running around in a Wigan shirt in the form of Joe Greenwood.
So sure, wax lyrical about the great work done by the Warriors in developing youth but don’t forget about ours just because most of them are established first team stars with international honours. A more paranoid soul than I might conclude that the furore around Wigan’s young stars is the product of the media’s unconscious bias towards them. Of that same media’s desperate hankering to go back to a time when Tina Turner songs belted out at Central Park in celebration of the only professional team in town. When they were heavyweight champions of the world with nobody to fight.
Of course it is exciting when young, hot prospects get a chance to show what they can do on the biggest stage. There was a buzz created by Kristian Woolf’s decision to finally include Lewis Dodd in the 17. Dodd had been denied a debut a few weeks ago due to a Covid-19 issue within the Saints camp but this game represented a perfect opportunity to give the reserves halfback a shot. By the end I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Not in Dodd. He came on for a good stint, showed some good touches and will have earned vital experience and knowledge of what first team rugby league is all about. My disappointment was with Woolf for deciding to use Dodd as a hooker to give James Roby a breather rather than in the youngster’s preferred halfback role.
We are told by those who watch the reserves and academy closely that Dodd is a natural 7. He is said to have pace, vision and a good kicking game. All the attributes you need to be a good playmaker. He may have all this and more but we are no closer to knowing if he can make the step up to Super League level in that position. I would just about understand Woolf’s reluctance to use Dodd at half if we had an incumbent who was making it impossible for the coach to leave him out. But we don’t, we have Theo Fages. It might be tactics that are strangling Fages, forcing him to look like an ineffective runner and a predictable field kicker, but how are we ever going to know if nobody else gets a go within Woolf’s system?
To be to Fages it is an attacking structure that can sometimes make Jonny Lomax look ordinary too. Saints win games - including this one - because Alex Walmsley, Roby, James Graham, Zeb Taia et al punch whopping great holes in opposition defences. Those holes allow the forwards to score tries (Walmsley has eight this year, about the same number your average prop can expect to score in a career) or create space for the outside backs. It’s little wonder Kevin Naiqama looks sleepy. He hasn’t had a pass since crowds were a thing. Very little is created by a bit of magic in the halves for Saints under Woolf and I want to see if it is the system or whether someone like Dodd can provide it. I think this match, despite the fact that it was a derby, was the best opportunity that Woolf is going to get to blood Dodd at 7 without having to think too much about consequences. Saints would have won this game with Bill And Ted at 6 and 7.
Walmsley was brilliant as usual. He is almost certainly the most important player in this current Saints set-up. He only had 13 carries in this one but he still ripped off 120 metres at nine metres per carry. Only Roby and Taia bettered that among Saints forwards even though the latter started this one on the bench. Regan Grace led the way in metre making with 187 but a fair chunk of that arrived during one carry for his second try. The Welshman was put into space by Lachlan Coote and scorched away down the left hand touchline before effortlessly swerving inside Wigan fullback Umyla Hanley. It was a thing of beauty, and not so rare these days as Grace’s improvement as a consistent strike winger continues.
The one negative against Walmsley was the tackle which led to Jack Wells leaving the field early. Wells has suffered medial ligament damage which, while better than some other ligament injuries, is still likely to lead to four to six weeks out of action. Walmsley was the third man in on Wells in the incident, the kind of stat-padding nonsense tackle that is unfortunately all too prevalent among players in the modern game.
It was probably within the rules as they stand. They state that a third tackler may not hit a ball carrier below the knee when he is making no further progress and is held by the other two defenders. Wells’ legs were still moving and they were also bent so we are not quite dealing with a so-called cannonball tackle. But I would just prefer it if the game’s authorities could come up with a way of removing this sort of tackle from the game. It is dangerous and quite often - as in this case - unnecessary. Lam hasn’t been too vocal about it beyond a vague suggestion that the disciplinary committee might want to look at it but that might be as much to do with his players living by this method of tackling as anything else. The irony meter will go into meltdown if we hear too much from the Wigan coach about unnecessary, dangerous tackles.
So job done for Saints as the focus switches to Wakefield Trinity next week. As the season creeps tentatively towards its conclusion, trying to avoid Covid pitfalls at every turn, you get the sense that the next derby match might just have a little bit more edge.