Well, as it turns out we were never destined to be
travelling to Wembley anyway.
As I write this the news is dominated by another edict from that oafish buffoon at No 10 about what we will not be able to do between now and next Spring. Perhaps with a keen sense of anticipation Saints prepared their fans for the disappointment of missing out on a return to the national stadium by crashing out of the Challenge Cup at the quarter-final stage following this 20-18 defeat to Warrington Wolves at Salford.
At the start of the week leading in to the game I fretted about the expected absence of Kevin Naiqama and Mark Percival. My ramblings on the 13 Pro-Am Rugby League Show included a rather doom-laden prediction that Warrington would win if Saints had to go in without their two starting centres. As it turned out both started. Naiqama’s two-game ban for whacking Kane Linnett around his head was overturned on appeal while Percival was deemed fit enough to return from a bothersome hamstring problem which had kept him out since the win over Castleford a month earlier. But it didn’t spare Kristian Woolf’s side.
If starting Percival was any sort of gamble it backfired. Without access to the medical evidence we cannot say with any great certainty whether a risk was taken with him, or whether he has just been extremely unfortunate again. After two beguiling involvements in the Jonny Lomax try which opened the scoring the Saints centre suffered what appeared to be a recurrence of his injury and was sidelined again after just 25 minutes. Adding to Saints problems, Jack Welsby also picked up a knock which forced Naiqama to fill in on the wing. That left Saints with a centre partnership of James Bentley and Morgan Knowles who, for all their work rate, endeavour and defensive prowess, lacked the required cutting edge to trouble Warrington with any regularity.
From then on Saints were undone by a mixture of the little things going against them and their own willingness to let those things beat them. Again they lacked creativity in midfield but that is not news since Theo Fages is unlikely to turn into Sean Long any time soon. The Frenchman’s bluntness often leaves Lomax looking like 30% of the player he could be, though in truth the Woolf gameplan does not seem to allow too much room for halfback trickery and imagination. What it relies on most weeks is power, something it has in spades in the shape of Alex Walmsley and James Graham, but beyond those two we might be witnessing an uncovering of a flaw in the plan.
We are not going to talk too much about Luke Thompson here. He has made his choice to leave and if he was still here then it is very likely that Graham would not be. So losing the Bulldogs man is not the primary problem. The problem is the back-up. Matty Lees is highly rated by many but has flattered to deceive more often than not when I have seen him, and beyond him we are relying on the willing but ageing Kyle Amor and Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook.
Amor’s form has improved in recent weeks but he is not a prop to put fear into the hearts of a title challenger like the Wolves. Yes I did say challenger. Nobody in their right mind is seriously suggesting that they will actually go on to win it. More on which later. Meanwhile, to describe McCarthy-Scarsbrook as a disaster waiting to happen would be to forget that those disasters have already happened on numerous occasions. A combination of the salary cap restraints and his interesting accent and hairstyles seem to have kept him among the favourites of fans and coaches alike. Yet even they could be reaching the end of their patience with him as he enters his 36th year by the start of the 2021 season.
The drop-off when either Walmsley or Graham is off the field is noticeable and marked. When both are off the field at the same time the difference is even more startling. Yet since Walmsley and Graham are both among the 11 members of this squad who are over 30 it is unrealistic to expect them to be able to play for longer minutes and still be as effective. Especially in the modern game where coaches are freshening up their forward options so regularly. Saints need Lees to step up and show some more of his early career promise. Otherwise we could be looking for as many as three or four new props in the winter sales given that Graham’s current plan is not to hang around on the field beyond the end of 2020.
Elsewhere the team looked jaded at times and never really convinced you that they were going to make the breakthrough they needed in the dying minutes. Some of the errors made looked like real fatigue-induced mistakes. Bentley halted one Warrington attack only to inexplicably spill the ball over the sideline and hand possession back to the Wolves, while a loose Warrington pass in midfield should have been picked up by Lees but he could only knock on as he dived to the floor to take possession.
These things don’t happen when Saints are at their best, irrespective of who is on the field. And still, through it all the difference in the game was one Lachlan Coote sideline conversion. Having plotted one over so beautifully following Regan Grace’s try to cut the deficit to 16-14 earlier in proceedings the Scottish international could not repeat the trick when Naiqama offered Saints something of a lifeline down the stretch by squeezing in at the right hand corner. On such things are games won and lost. There are fine margins at the highest levels.
Fine margins, but familiar results in recent times. As has been pointed out by many a Wire fan on social media this latest victory for them is one of a number which is dangerously veering towards a definite trend. Warrington gubbed Saints 19-0 when they met at the Haliwell Jones prior to the chaos of the pandemic, while few Saints fans will quickly forget the 18-4 defeat we suffered to Steve Price’s side at Wembley a year ago or the 2018 Super League semi-final in which the previously ingenious Ben Barba faded into his own posterior.
Is this just a bad run, a coincidence, or is there something more in it? Have Wire, and specifically Price, worked out how to play against this Saints side? To nullify its strengths and prey on its weaknesses? Both Saints and Wire fans will remember an eternally long run during which Saints routinely beat Warrington in the Super League era. It stretched to something absurd like 38 games and included two or three miracle comebacks when the red vee had looked dead and buried. Is that about to happen in reverse? Do we believe in this hokey superstitious stuff or have we just not produced the right kind of performance in recent meetings with the Wolves? Will we get it right next time and once again be looking down on them, trophy aloft, while the Twitter account dedicated to counting the days since their last Championship gets set for another 12-month run?
It helps when you have a bit of luck on your side, of course. I’m not into ref-bashing so we won’t be going down that dark hole. Yet there was an element of pantomime about Josh Charnley’s second try which proved decisive. A Jack Hughes pass which could euphemistically be described as a ‘line ball’ somehow hit chief villain Anthony Gelling in his empty melon and spiralled forward into the open arms of Charnley. The former Wigan man had an easy run in to the line. Listening to the video referees deliberations he seemed in no doubt that the rebound off Gelling’s head meant play on and did not constitute a knock-on. So that appears to be that. Whether or not you think there should be a rule change to outlaw any advantage from incidents like this is another debate, but comparisons to John Harrison’s famous assist for George Mann against Sheffield Eagles in 1990 do not really hold. That was a clearly deliberate header forward by Harrison on that occasion, whereas Gelling knew about as much about the Hughes pass hitting his head as he knows about staying out of his local police interview room.
Whether part of some higher powered curse or not, the defeat kills the prospect of Saints ending what will now become a 13-year wait to lift the Challenge Cup. I can remember a time when Saints had not won the Challenge Cup for the entirety of my by then 21-year existence so 13 years doesn’t set any records in my time. There will be older fans who may remember even more barren spells, or who recall seeing their first silverware captured at an age well in advance of 21. But also there will be those who have been brought up on the almost unbroken success of the Super League era since 1996. For those fans 13 years will seem like an eternity.
There would have been no Wembley for those young fans this year in any case. We can now take solace in the adage of concentrating on the league, which of course in our case still involves winning a knockout game at the end of the year in order to have a league title ratified. That’s shitty, but were it not the case then that ever so funny Warrington Twitter account would be a thing of the past. Swings and roundabouts. We are still in a good position to retain the Super League title, such as it is in the age of Covid. And who knows? When Boris Johnson, Chris Fucking Whitty and Covid-19 are but a ghoulish footnote in a horrific period of British history we may yet get back to Wembley and see our team win again.
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