Saints returned to the winners enclosure with a convincing win over a troubled, borderline psychologically disturbed Wigan at the DW Stadium on Friday night (August 20).
Kristian Woolf’s side had felt the unfamiliar discomfort of defeat last week when they went down 20-10 at home to Castleford Tigers. In that context victory in the derby was vital. Not only so you can hold your head up high in the office on Monday morning but also to keep alive hopes of reeling in Catalans Dragons in the race for the League Leaders Shield. It may not matter to some fans - or even Woolf - for whom the Grand Final is the measure by which the season will be adjudged to be successful or otherwise - but you can’t very well rattle on about dominance and claim a place in the pantheon of Saints greatest ever teams if you can’t finish above a side as ordinary as Steve McNamara’s lot.
Saints had to do without the services of Tommy Makinson who was suspended following his red card against Castleford. It was Kevin Naiqama - and not Jack Welsby - who was given the task of filling in on the right wing. Welsby switched into Naiqama’s regular right centre slot which begged the question - if you’d move Naiqama to accommodate Welsby when the youngster can just as easily operate on the wing why does the Fijiian regularly get the nod between the two when everybody is available? In moving Naiqama outside and Welsby inside you are shifting two players when all you really needed to do was have Welsby switch wings to cover Makinson. He had played on the opposite wing in the absence of Regan Grace last time out but has also featured on the right wing at times.
Perhaps Woolf saw something in the Wigan line-up which persuaded him that this positional arrangement would work better. Naiqama is just about in the top 20 of worst offenders in Super League when it comes to missed tackles so there maybe was a case for matching him up with Liam Marshall rather than Oliver Gildart on Wigan’s left edge. But you could likely make the case every week that Naiqama is better suited to handling wingers than centres. It won’t be a problem for much longer as Naiqama leaves and Welsby switches to fullback to cover the departing Lachlan Coote.
Other than Grace the other major returnee for Saints was Morgan Knowles. The Cumbrian is exactly the sort of player you need for a derby scrap. Especially if your geography means that your derby opponents are the grubbiest, dirtiest team in sport and you are playing them at a time when their pent up rage is about to explode. Knowles gives Saints very little offensively when you look at the stats. I never cease to scratch my head at outlandish comparisons with Paul Sculthorpe. Yet defensively he is absolutely key for Saints and his absence in the defeat by Castleford was one of the major reasons for it. Here he was immense defensively, tirelessly racking up 45 tackles. Only Kai Pearce-Paul matched that on either side.
Saints took a little time to get going in this one. Never the most expansive, they couldn’t hang on to the ball enough in the first half even within the conservative framework of Woolf’s gameplan. Jonny Lomax, Joel Thompson, Welsby and Agnatius Paasi were all guilty of fairly routine errors which prevented Saints from gathering any real attacking momentum. Still, there was not very much at all coming at them at the other end from a positively anaemic Wigan side.
Grace was the first to raise the level of attack on show, jinking out of a tackle inside his own 20 and haring off on a 50-metre jaunt into Wigan territory. At which point he displayed the slight weakness in his game which still keeps him a step behind the Martin Offiahs and Anthony Sullivans of this world by rather running out of steam. He made it quite easy for the covering Zak Hardaker to not only stop him but also prevent him from finding any of his support. Yet Grace is nothing if not persistent, scoring at the end of the subsequent set. Lewis Dodd set up the position as he straightened up to draw the defence in. That allowed Coote the space to produce his speciality, the catch and pass to a waiting winger just a few yards out. The Aussie fullback goaled to give Saints a 6-0 lead.
Wigan’s only points of the night followed after an unseemly spat between ex-Bradford pair John Bateman and James Bentley. Bateman had spent time during the build up helpfully promoting mindless violence by telling the press how much he would enjoy decapitating someone in the red vee. With that mindset going in it is little wonder he got himself in trouble. Twice as it turned out. He was sin-binned after this altercation and again later for speaking out of turn to referee Chris Kendall.
On this occasion he went for his part in a set to with Bentley. As the Saints man got up after making a tackle Bateman needlessly grabbed his leg. Bentley - who did not seem to have dialled down the stupidity very much following his berserk performance against Cas last week - responded by petulantly flicking out a leg which made slight contact with Bateman’s head. If you’re trying to imagine the level of violence without having seen it think David Beckham’s ill-fated flick at Diego Simeone during England’s World Cup defeat to Argentina in France in 1998. There the similarities between Bentley and Beckham begin and end, except maybe for the first two letters of their surnames. After Beckham’s faux pas there was much talk about how he was in danger of throwing away his talent before he reinvented himself as a national icon. Bentley isn’t going to make the pages of Q Magazine any time soon but he faces the same questions about what he wants to do with his ability. I’m sure the majority of us won’t mind too much if he fluffs his lines once he has moved to Leeds but for now his indiscipline is very much our problem and something Woolf would do well to address.
Despite both Bentley and Bateman heading for the sin bin it was the Saints man who Kendall chose to penalise. You really might as well have tossed a coin. They both should have been penalised for embarrassment. In the event it allowed Harry Smith to convert the two points to bring Adrian Lam’s side back into it at 6-2.
No matter, as it only took Saints a few minutes to re-establish their hold on the game. Dodd’s try was the undoubted highlight of the game. Not only because it was the sort of bright, impudent and quick-thinking that is all but extinct in the modern game, but also because it humiliated one of Wigan’s over-rated young grubs into the bargain. Oliver Partington - back in the Wigan ranks to far more fanfare than he justifies - was running the ball out from near his own posts when he was met by a textbook tackle from Dodd. As the pair fell to the ground - and crucially just before the tackle was joined by Matty Lees - Dodd ripped the ball from Partington’s grasp and spun away from him to scoot over. It was checked to make sure Lees was not involved before the strip. It turns out this was one occasion on which we were all glad that Lees was late to the party. Coote was left with a simple conversion and Saints went into the break with a 12-2 lead.
Having returned from his period of rest Bateman was back with more villainy as Saints stretched the lead just a few minutes after half-time. Coote had got on the end of a beautiful Lomax chip only to be taken high by a desperate tackle from Jackson Hastings. It’s nice that he still cares enough. What Kendall either missed completely or chose to deal with leniently was Bateman’s blatant block of the run by Lomax as he attempted to chase his own kick. My boycott of the NRL continues following their World Cup sabotage but I have seen enough games over the last two seasons to know that Bateman would have been sitting down again if he’d done that while in the colours of Canberra. Here the only punishment was another two points - this time from the boot of Dodd while Coote received attention for his head injury - to push the lead out to 14-2.
It only took a few more minutes for Bateman to earn another breather, this time for flapping his gums at Kendall once too often as the ongoing battle between Bateman and Bentley threatened to boil over again. While Bateman was away Saints should have put the tin hat on the victory almost immediately. Mark Percival somehow failed to hang on to an inviting kick from Dodd which bounced up just a couple of metres from the Wigan line. Percival would eventually make up for it with a decisive score, but not before 10 minutes of outright mania from Wigan headcase Willie Isa.
Isa was eventually yellow carded, but quite how he was not sent off is something of a mystery that only Kendall can explain. In truth the referee rather hid behind the nefarious on-report system which allows officials to pass the buck to someone else to decide the seriousness of an offence later in the week. Isa could have gone for his first transgression, needlessly throwing a forearm into the head of Grace as the Welshman played the ball.
That somehow failed to get Kendall’s attention, so Isa let a couple of minutes pass before twice hitting Welsby late. The second shot arrived while Welsby was lying fairly defenceless on the floor having been hit with the first. Still the referee kept his cards in his pocket when a red would have been appropriate and a yellow the absolute minimum. There is an argument that Lam should then have substituted Isa at this point to protect him from himself but in truth it shouldn’t have been left to the coach. Had Kendall acted more quickly we may not have seen the third and final act of Isa’s trilogy of madness, a quite senseless flick into the face of Percival as both contested a high ball. At that point even Kendall’s patience snapped and Isa was marched towards the sin bin. By this time Bateman had just returned to the field. The timing of Isa’s yellow couldn’t help but make you feel like Kendall’s leniency with Isa to that point had come from a reluctance to put one side down to 11 men.
When Isa’s performance is reviewed by the disciplinary panel a lengthy ban needs to be applied. His indiscipline followed on from that of Bateman, but it set a tone thereafter for a period in which Wigan played down to our low expectations of their on-field behaviour. For the last 20 minutes they wore the look of a team that knew it was not going to get close to winning and so had decided to take as many of the opposition as possible down with them.
When they operate like this they expose themselves as the worst Wigan team since their 2006 vintage. While Saints swept all before them that year winning all three domestic trophies, Wigan only avoided relegation after the controversial, salary cap dodging purchase of former England prop and present day Covid denier Stuart Fielden. This team isn’t quite relegation material but the pro-Wigan media’s fantasy of a late season charge to the Grand Final seems fanciful on this evidence. Particularly since the kind of transfer loopholes big enough to fit international superstars through have now been closed. From the chat among the Wigan fans the only thing keeping Lam in a job is his club’s reluctance or even inability to pay compensation.
Percival did get his try a minute or so after Isa’s ignominious exit. Again it was Lomax and Coote who combined to find Grace who this time turned the ball back inside to his centre for a simple walk-in. Coote missed the extras but added a penalty soon after which gave Saints a 20-2 lead. Given the way Wigan were playing and the lack of threat coming from them it was an advantage that had gone way past unassailable into a new dimension of decisive finality. There was no coming back from this.
Just to be sure, Alex Walmsley powered over in the last moments of the game. It was the prop’s fourth try of the season and capped an 18-carry, 144 metre performance that saw him easily lead the Saints pack in metres gained. The closest to him among the other Saints forwards was the 97 managed by 35-year-old Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook. For a team which relies on its physicality so much and which often wears the grass out of the middle third of the field, it is worryingly reliant on the endeavour of Walmsley. Aside from him it is left to the backs to do the hardest yards and that is always going to be more challenging without Makinson. That Percival racked up 170 metres without making a single clean break tells you a lot about Saints tactically.
Defensively Woolf’s side can’t really be faulted despite the bluntness of the Wigan attack. This was the first time Wigan had failed to score a try at home in the league since they went down 11-4 to Warrington in 1993. That Wigan side contained Shaun Edwards, Jason Robinson, Steve Hampson and Denis Betts as well as Sky Sports attention seeker and erstwhile seriously good rugby league player Phil Clarke. All of those were several levels up from Partington and company but you can only defend against what is put in front of you. I’m not convinced that this was a defensive masterclass from Saints simply because one was not required against an opponent in this much disarray. Yet keeping the try line from being breached is always a notable achievement worth congratulating the players on.
Next up for Saints is the visit of a Leigh side which has just won its first league game at the 17th attempt. Despite the Centurions’ success over Salford they shouldn’t provide too much of an obstacle for Woolf’s side before what looks an altogether trickier assignment away at Warrington on bank holiday Monday. After that we should have better idea of whether the League Leaders Shield is still on, which will in turn determine how Woolf will manage his resources in the run-in towards the playoffs. Saints are not pretty and as they proved last week they are not infallible either. But you wouldn’t bet against them winning a third Grand Final in a row come October irrespective of whether the prove good enough to finish top of the pile or not.
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