Lots of fans will will offer differing opinions about what went wrong in Thursday night’s defeat to Warrington. There will be a variety of views about its long term consequences too. But can we agree on one thing? Can we all be grown up enough to admit that it was absolutely and unrelentingly awful?
Maybe we won’t. There will no doubt still be some who refuse to see the team’s shortcomings and instead focus their attention on referee Chris Kendall. Or perhaps point to Warrington players feigning injury as if this is a) any barrier to Saints playing something that resembles rugby or b) a new thing and not something that has been going on in rugby league since professionalism raised the stakes 25 years ago. But what cannot be disputed is that in losing to Steve Price’s side Saints missed the chance to go back to the top of the Super League table. It’s a position from which they had only been originally removed by Leeds Rhinos’ inability to fulfil their fixtures and Catalans Dragons’ victory over a still winless Leigh Centurions side. Now Saints’ task of reclaiming it has been made just that little bit more tricky.
The bottom line is that Warrington deserved to win and Saints did not. Not that Wire were particularly good. For all the usual cheerleading from Baz and Tez about what a great game this was, from my position on the sofa during these times of ballot dependency it was a fairly smelly affair. Yes there was intensity and admirable defensive efforts. The level of fitness required from both sides is off the charts. But in terms of skill levels it was - in cricketing parlance - absolutely village.
Despite an approach from both coaches for which the word conservative is as inadequate as Matt Hancock there were still 23 errors in the game. Ten from Warrington and 13 from Saints. Many of those were simple dropped passes under very little pressure or little fumbles from dummy half at the play the ball. The kind that when they go against you are always the fault of the referee for not awarding a penalty for the ruck interference that goes on at every single play the ball ever. Yes, even your team does it, whoever you support. What those errors also signify is a lack of concentration and a general sloppiness on the part of the culprits.
The one genuine moment of class in the game ultimately decided it. Saints were clinging to a slender 2-0 lead given to them by Lachlan Coote’s 13th minute penalty awarded after Stefan Ratchford had stolen the ball illegally from Alex Walmsley. Nine minutes later Ratchford found Tom Lineham in space on the left flank and the former Hull man raced clear to find Ben Currie in support on his inside. Currie hasn’t been quite at the level of his 2016 breakthrough in recent seasons mainly due to persistent injuries, but he produced a moment here that reminded us all of his quality.
It was hard to imagine one of Saints second row duo on the night of Sione Mata’utia and Joel Thompson coming up with a similar play. They run hard, are often complemented for their industry and ‘good lines’, but the Saints pair don’t really do clean breaks and try scoring in the way that Currie does. Or the way that say...Zeb Taia did. Not to beat you over the head with stats but Saints second row pairing made 173 metres between them. Currie made 113 by himself and even that does not itself qualify as pulling up trees. There seems little doubt that Saints need more in that area.
The loss of James Bentley - who is currently out with a broken leg but has in any case agreed to join Leeds Rhinos from 2022 - will not help. Given my previous comments about Bentley in this column it would be hypocritical of me to start phoning the Samaritans in response to the loss of the Irish international. He is just another solid grafter with perhaps the potential to be something more in the right system under the right coach. Personally I doubt that is Leeds Rhinos under Richard Agar. But as he has explained Bentley is a Leeds fan and from that area. Those are compelling reasons for him to make the switch even if at this moment in time it doesn’t look like a very ambitious career move. Nevertheless Bentley was a starter for Saints before his injury and we are seeing the limitations of those tasked with replacing him. Suddenly there is a lot riding on the development of Jake Wingfield.
Some fans have criticised Saints on the assumption that the club were outbid by the Rhinos in their attempts to keep Bentley. But sometimes those are the realities of the salary cap, particularly in the aftermath of a pandemic which shut down the whole game for five months, wiped out gate receipts for 14 months and continues to limit attendances to only a quarter of the stadium capacity. Add that to the fact that the player had a desire to move and it becomes almost impossible to keep him.
Back on the field a lot has rightly been made of the fact that Saints failed to score a try all night. For a champion team in a game of this magnitude, at home, this is a fairly embarrassing stat. Yet have you heard the one about the champion team playing at home in a game of this magnitude who only managed one clean break all night? That came from Joe Batchelor - a fringe player who is only in the 17 because of the injury to Bentley. Warrington weren’t exactly tearing holes in the Saints defence. They only broke the line on three occasions which tells you something about the lack of excitement on offer throughout this tedious affair. But it also tells you that there is very little wrong with Saints defence. It is the best in Super League by some distance. Kristian Woolf’s side have conceded 76 points in nine outings at an average of just 8.4 per game. They are the only team to concede fewer than 100 points so far in Super League in 2021. Phenomenal. But the game is about more than just stopping the opponent from scoring. At some stage you have to put some points on the board.
Woolf’s team has basically neglect attack as if it will just happen. Like a Jose Mourinho-led football team parking the bus. Make sure you don’t concede and you can’t lose. But you can’t play rugby league like that. If you only concede six points you are within your rights to expect to win but you can’t just wait for the opposition to fall over. Rugby league is more than just a fitness test.
The problems we had in attack against Warrington are not particularly new for this season. How often have we reflected on a win by commenting that we are not doing well in attack? That defence is winning us games? Yet it is not going to improve unless we address it head on. Woolf will no doubt step into another press conference and explain that we were ‘a little bit off’ in attack. As if there is some previously achieved level of bewildering expansiveness that we are just not reaching at the moment. This is at best a myth and at worst a glaring example of a coach blatantly attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of the fans. Saints are not ‘a bit off’, ‘off the boil’ or that modern fan favourite ‘clunky’. They are as dull as a day at the office and it is unquestionably by design. The risk averse strategy that produced no clean breaks here is quite deliberate from Woolf. He is a disciple of The Grind. The kind of thing Keiron Cunningham was trying to do only he had Jack Owens and Matty Dawson while Woolf has Regan Grace and Jack Welsby. This team is just better at it than Cunningham’s side. Usually.
From that point of view I am reluctant to blame the players for this performance, or for any of the previous occasions this year that I have expressed how underwhelmed I am even after winning displays. I have been critical of individuals at certain points this year but in fairness what do they have to work with? They are clearly being sent out with instructions to keep the ball close to the ruck, minimise passing and prioritise getting to the end of the set. Theo Fages may put up a bomb too many for my tastes but in this environment Wally Lewis would struggle. Ask your dad. Or maybe your grandad. It is all very un-Saints-like. It would be easy to lambast Woolf for failing to have a grasp on the history and traditions of the club. But the uneasy truth is that increasingly this is modern rugby league. Even the English coaches in Super League talk about completing sets, going through the processes and getting into The Grind. It is a big problem in the game and Woolf is the embodiment of it. And never more so than when he has success with it as he did last year and has for the most part this year too.
If we are getting into specifics the problem with the attack is largely that it is too predictable. If we are not stuffing it up the jumper of Walmsley and asking him to take us forward we have a very basic, two-option play that we seem to run and run whenever we get into what Woolf deems safe attacking territory. There is one lead runner who can be hit with a flat pass and one out of the back whose greater depth is meant to create space. Often it does, but on this night Warrington read it every time and were there in enough numbers to cover it. Woolf might just as well have sent Price an email detailing what we were going to do in attacking situations. Some have complained that there is no Plan B which is demonstrably true. But when Plan A is this dull and predictable you’re in decidedly even choppier waters.
Controlling Walmsley’s output was also a big key for Warrington. We rely on him so much now. Not just since the devastating loss of Luke Thompson to Canterbury Bulldogs but also with Matty Lees out. Agnatius Paasi adds impact but does not seem to be seen by Woolf as someone who can play big minutes. Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook and Kyle Amor are what they are, but they should be nobody’s idea of an effective front row for a potential title winner.
Price’s men restricted Walmsley to 91 metres on 14 carries. That may sound like a decent enough contribution from Walmsley but he regularly breaks through the 100 metre barrier. When he does not it invariably means bad things are happening for the team as a whole. Saints had no forwards over 100m on the night. Their top metre-maker was Tommy Makinson. His 220m game is both a supreme individual effort but also a revealing insight into how Saints insist on using a try-scoring, injury-prone winger as a battering ram on their bloody ‘exit sets’. What are the forwards doing?
Will that winning feeling return next week? Saints go to Hull KR on Friday night. They do so potentially without Walmsley, Makinson, Morgan Knowles and Jonny Lomax all of whom are in Shaun Wane’s 24-man party for England’s match against the Combined Nations. That will be whittled down to 19 in midweek and our best hope at this point looks to be that some of our guys don’t make the cut. Of course that is a selfish viewpoint and in reality we all want England to do well, especially with Saints players involved and even if it means the former chief pie getting all of the credit. A successful World Cup could be a game changer for the sport and in the grand scheme of things is more important than a win at Hull KR. There shouldn’t be any league games when clubs have to release players for England and the Combined Nations but that is another debate. Whichever way you slice it if you are a Saints fan you are probably apprehensive about going to an improving Rovers side on the back of an abject performance and loss.