It’s starting to get a little repetitive. Saints extended their unbeaten start to the 2021 Super League campaign with a fifth consecutive league win and a sixth in all competitions. You have to go back to the end of October to find their last competitive defeat. Yet it was another underwhelming, unconvincing performance of the kind that has characterised Saints season so far.
To be fair to coach Kristian Woolf he was confronted with some unhelpful injury problems ahead of this one. Tommy Makinson was still not fit to return following the foot injury which had kept him out of last week’s 18-10 win over Huddersfield Giants. Joel Thompson missed out against the Centurions with a similar problem. A thumb injury means we have yet to see Morgan Knowles in action in 2021 while it was recently revealed that Matty Lees faces months out after having surgery on a broken ankle. The situation would get worse before this 22-12 success over John Duffy’s side reached its conclusion. More on that sorry tale later.
With Thompson out Woolf chose to hand a first start to Jake Wingfield at loose forward, with a second row pairing of Sione Mata’utia and James Bentley. Wingfield has been deployed as a spelling hooker in more recent times although he is listed as a back rower and would have been more than comfortable in the 13 role. Most of his best work was defensive though he did manage to miss nine tackles while affecting 32. He only carried the ball five times for 25 metres but this is not unusual for a Saints lock in the modern game. For all the smoke that is consistently blown up the derrière of Knowles he too is a more defence orientated player. He does not regularly feature among the side’s top metre makers, try assisters or try scorers. But he tackles. A lot. Only James Roby (43 tackles), Bentley (37) and Alex Walmsley (34) were more active defensively for Saints than the deputising Wingfield, though Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook also managed 32. Seen from that viewpoint Wingfield did a pretty serviceable job.
Elsewhere the team selection was similar to what we had seen against Ian Watson’s Giants. Kevin Naiqama filled Makinson’s right wing role and Mark Percival remained at right centre to accommodate the in-form Jack Welsby. McCarthy-Scarsbrook continued to get the nod for Lees place in the front row ahead of Agnatius Paasi who saw action from the bench along with Kyle Amor, Lewis Dodd and Joe Batchelor. All of which again left much of the heavy lifting at prop to Walmsley, who racked up 106 metres on 12 carries. No other Saints prop managed more than Amor’s 94 on 13 carries. McCarthy-Scarsbrook for his part churned out 61 metres on just eight carries.
My eyes may have been deceiving me - and I’d probably be forgiven if I started to hallucinate watching Woolf’s teams at this point - but it appeared that there was a willingness in Saints attack to spread the ball a little wider more often. Almost as if Woolf had identified that this Leigh side - who had conceded 130 points in their last three league outings at an average of over 43 points per game - might be vulnerable to a side boasting some of the best three-quarters in the competition. Mata’utia and Regan Grace found some joy at times down Saints left edge and both racked up more than 100m of go-forward.
Mata’utia’s contribution was a refreshing change to the more attritional style of Thompson. The former Newcastle Knights man gained 133 metres on 14 carries and scored Saints first try of the evening. He looked infinitely more threatening running wide in that left channel than he has during any of his appearances in the middle. Meanwhile Grace burned Leigh for 125 metres on 7 carries. That’s not a lot of touches for such a potent weapon but it’s about six more than he normally gets in Woolf’s system. Small steps. One slight concern with Grace was just the slight hint of a return to the hesitancy that was a feature of his early Saints career. Sometimes he just needs to pin his ears back.
While there was greater willing what was lacking was consistent execution. Saints came up with 22 errors in total, with the unfortunate Bentley responsible for five of those. A decidedly out of sorts Percival came up with four more while Lachlan Coote had three. Percival is clearly still trying to shake off some pretty heavy rust. Yet as a general point it seemed that Saints weren’t able to execute the more expansive plays they tried because they just haven’t been used to playing more than one pass off the ruck so far this term. It turns out that you can’t turn it on and off like a tap. It didn’t help that Theo Fages seem to continually fluff his lines when the opportunity to create came along. His decision making was rivalled only by the predictability of his air raid approach to an attacking kicking game. It was only when he got himself sent to the sin bin for a professional foul that Coote stepped in to aim one or two attacking kicks a bit lower for a tad more variety. Not that they were particularly more effective.
Fages compounded another highly questionable performance not only with his sin binning but with an errant pass which was gleefully plucked out of the air by the soon to be defendant Anthony Gelling. He raced 80 metres to score to bring Leigh back into the game at 18-12 with still over half an hour to play. That had followed a frantic first five minutes of the second period when quick fire tries from Welsby and Coote threatened to crank Saints back into top gear. Hopes were high at that point that we’d see a repeat of the Wakefield Trinity game when a flat and literally pointless first half gave way to a dazzling 34-point, six-try extravaganza after the break. But it did not materialise this time. Instead Saints had to rely on Naiqama’s 58th minute score for a bit of breathing space. The Fijian found himself all alone from a superb Coote pass to the right wing and it was almost a formality to stroll in and break Leigh’s resolve.
While That Saints Blog considers ref-blaming to be the last refuge of the desperate it would be remiss not to note a fairly eccentric performance from whistle-blower Marcus Griffiths. The ruck area is a difficult one to police but it is a head scratcher as to how he came up with five set restarts for Leigh in that first half without awarding a single one to Saints. That looks even more suspect when you consider that he stopped pinging Saints for it after the break and instead collared the Leigh defence for it on four occasions. A more cynical writer might suggest that Woolf saw which way the wind had blown in the opening 40 and had a quiet word. On the other hand an idealist might put it down to Woolf gently persuading his players to improve their discipline after the break. Discipline - and in particular the concession of set restarts - has been a common thread running through many of Saints performances this year.
As the clock wound down on a job done and thoughts began to turn to next week’s Challenge Cup date with the Giants there was a nasty sting in the tail. Bentley went down awkwardly under a gang tackle and lay pretty motionless on the Leigh Sports Village turf for some time before he was eventually carried off on a stretcher. At the time of writing there is no firm news on the extent of the injury but it doesn’t look like the news will be good when it arrives. Much of the speculation suggested a possible broken ankle which would potentially rule the former Bradford man out for months as it has in the case of Lees. We can only hope it is nothing worse than that. Ligament damage around that area could add a whole new level of complexity which could yet rule him out for the remainder of the year.
Whatever the extent of Bentley’s injury it seems implausible that he will feature next week. If Thompson is still not fit to return and Knowles isn’t ready either then we are looking at taking on an improving Huddersfield without four of the players who would arguably start in Saints six-man forward pack. Makinson is another key figure whose continued absence would make life more difficult as we look to end a 13-year wait for a Wembley win. But even without the injuries I’d be concerned about this one just because of the way Saints have gone about their business so far in 2021. The last meeting with the Giants less than a fortnight ago was uncomfortably close. It would not take a massive improvement from Watson’s side to spring an upset against a Saints side playing at its current level.
I’ve got to be honest I’m genuinely worried that we might not make it through to the last four. There’ll be those who shrug and say that a win is a win, a kind of logic you can’t really argue with. But for how long can you keep doing it with sub par performances like this one?
It’s starting to get a little repetitive. I’d settle for that next week, but we must...must improve.
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