A patched up Saints turned in a gritty if imperfect performance to edge Leeds Rhinos on Friday night (July 28).
It was a win which kept Paul Wellens’ side inside the top four and within realistic striking distance of Wigan and Leigh above them in the fight for what could be a crucial top two spot. Meanwhile the Rhinos suffered an 11th defeat in 20 league outings this term and find themselves four points adrift of a top six playoff spot.
Wellens had to cobble together a makeshift pack due to all of the injuries and suspensions in that department. Alex Walmsley and Agnatius Paasi have been Asiatad out of contention for the rest of the year, but the second row is currently even more depleted. Joe Batchelor and Curtis Sironen are still out injured while Sione Mata’utia added to the problems by picking up another two-game suspension for a late hit on Ben Reynolds in last week’s Challenge Cup semi-final loss to the Leopards. To add to all that, Joey Lussick is no longer an option for Wellens after the former Salford man chose to head back to Parramatta immediately.
Teenage prop George Delaney was given a first start while there was also a debut off the bench for Moses Mbye - picked up from St George-Illawarra Dragons as a replacement for Lussick this week. Sam Royle was handed his first appearance since the defeat in Perpignan at the start of May. Joining Mbye on the bench were Lewis Baxter for his third first team appearance, Dan Norman for his first since Saints’ season opening win at Castleford in February, and centre and occasional back rower Ben Davies.
Leeds coach Rohan Smith was able to name the same 17 which went down to a 19-18 golden point loss at home to Hull KR in their last outing a fortnight ago. I say able. Maybe forced would be a better word.
This was the third meeting between these two in 2023. The previous two had ended in one-point wins for the away side. By the end of this one we had ourselves an epic trilogy. We all hate loop fixtures for all the obvious reasons. Over familiarity with opponents, distortion of the competition, the M62 on a Friday night. But if the concept of loop fixtures has one thing going for it then it’s that just very occasionally it can throw up a narrative between two clubs within the larger story arc of the Super League season.
The star of Act III was undoubtedly Jack Welsby, a man whose universal loathing by opposition fans - especially those of a Wigan persuasion - is all the proof you need that the 22 year-old is a bona fide superstar. There are still doubts about his suitability for the fullback role - and again we saw a few ropey moments to illustrate that - but if you came away from the stadium or stood up from your sofa after the game thinking anything except what an outstanding, generational talent he is then you weren’t paying enough attention.
Even in this most robotic era of must win tactics you can surely find it in you to tolerate the odd kick out on the full or the sight of him being rounded rather too easily by an opposition prop in exchange for what he brings to an otherwise morbidly stunted attack. Welsby notched two more tries and an assist, the latter sending him to the top of the Super League charts in that category with 21. His eight tries in Super League in 2023 make him Saints’ second highest meat pie grabber with eight, two behind Tommy Makinson who’s 10 make him the only Saint in double figures.
It’s all done with a swagger which further irritates those opposition fans and which makes us enjoy him even more. If Saints have it in their gift to extend his stay beyond the end of his current deal in 2025 then they should do it now. Even if it means Mr McManus cutting his summer holidays short. Of course it may be out of his hands. If a player with Welsby’s talent wants to take his wares to the more lucrative and greater intensity NRL then there is little anybody can do. It will be a sad day for us all if that happens.
One man who hasn’t always been popular with Saints fans is slowly changing minds. Will Hopoate has had what could most kindly be described as a mixed spell with Saints since arriving at the start of 2022. He has only made 28 appearances in that time thanks largely to a desperate run with injuries. The majority of those appearances have provoked the ire of some fans who complain about his perceived lack of effort while running the ball and his alleged positional lapses in defence. Yet the former Canterbury man has been excellent in recent weeks. He led the team in metres made on two occasions while standing in for Makinson on the wing. Having reverted to centre to replace Mark Percival in this one the Tongan international scored a try and came up with two assists. Even if the first of those - which allowed Ritson to send Saints in level at 12-12 at the break - looked decidedly forward.
The ex-Bulldog was first to Welsby’s short kick to the in-goal after only three minutes before his offload returned the favour for the fullback to put Saints up 16-12 just after half-time. He also made 15 tackles. Whisper it, but the 31 year-old may just be starting to show why no less a judge than Kristian Woolf brought him in.
With Walmsley, Paasi and Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook out Saints needed Matty Lees to step up and provide more of the go-forward. Those absentees made Lees the senior prop and to his credit he recognised it and upped his game accordingly. He’s been a top defensive player for some time, illustrated by another 36 tackles here. He averaged 34.76 tackles per game coming in. No Saint has matched his tally of 627 during this season. But his work with ball in hand has been mostly understated until this week. It’s perhaps understandable when you play so much rugby next to Walmsley but Lees’ pre-game average of 69.4 metres per game was underwhelming. However, a 112-metre effort in this one raises hopes that he can go some way to filling the void while still maintaining his defensive work rate. Saints will need that from him.
Much of the build up to this one centred around the events at Warrington a week ago. During Leigh’s semi-final win over Saints John Asiata found a new and interesting way to firstly cause a fair percentage of Wellens’ staff shortages and also to make the game’s authorities look like total mugs. His head first assault tackling style caused the injuries to Walmsley and Paasi which have ended their seasons and more minor issues for McCarthy-Scarsbrook and Morgan Knowles. Of those two only Knowles was fit to take his place in the line-up.
I mention this because - in a more predictable turn of events than Daryl Powell’s Warrington exit - coaches and players have already begun capitalising on the authorities’ refusal to outlaw the ‘technique’ until the end of the season. James Bell wins this week’s top prize for irony by chopping down former Saint and anger management therapy candidate James Bentley early in this one. The irony being that having spent much of the week rightly highlighting its dangers Saints are one of the first teams to fail to resist the urge to join those whom they feel they cannot beat.
Wellens was very animated in his condemnation of Asiata’s challenges. As such I find it impossible to believe that he has actively instructed his troops to tee off on opponents with armless impunity. This one is probably all on Bell. I’m guessing he took a short cut with his technique, knowing that firstly Leeds were in possession in Saints territory and looking threatening and secondly that given the rules makers’ response in midweek he was not going to get penalised by referee Liam Moore, much less yellow or red carded. And so it proved.
Bentley was unharmed which I’m pretty sure was Bell’s intention. He just wanted to stop the Leeds man’s progress. But it all serves to highlight the folly of kicking the issue down the road and trusting players and coaches to stamp it out of the game themselves. If you don’t explicitly outlaw something then expect it to continue until you do. Quite why we can’t all agree that it’s a shoulder charge and penalise it as such I’m not sure. Yet as it is Moore had nowhere to go in terms of sanctioning Bell. One wonders how many serious injuries it will take before action is taken to deter players from partaking in this lazy, dangerous indulgence.
Of course even if you legislate against something it can still produce different outcomes if it is interpreted differently by different officials. Many decisions have a subjective element which cannot be removed so you are going to get variation from week to week. The consistency that fans constantly call for is a pipe dream in reality.
Saints benefitted from this in the lead up to Ritson’s game-tying try just before the break. Last week at Warrington Ritson appeared to be pushed in the back by Tom Briscoe in the lead up to Zak Hardaker’s crucial try. The Saints man didn’t get the call on that occasion. This week he did. As he and James McDonnell chased an Aidan Sezer kick to the Saints in-goal the Leeds back-rower was penalised for the contact he made with Ritson. That set up the possession from which Saints headed downfield and tied the game through Ritson’s try, suspiciously provided by Hopoate. On another day his pass to the Thai-born winger may have been ruled forward. But that’s subjectivity. It’s here to stay.
To try and limit the errors made by officials we do of course have our friend the video referee. This week it was Ben Thaler. Perhaps his key intervention was the one which saw a potential second try for Sam Walters chalked off. It came just two minutes into the second half and would have broken the 12-12 tie. An Aidan Sezer skyscraper was allowed to bounce by Welsby and picked up by Blake Austin. He sent it out to Ash Handley who produced a classy no-look offload to Walters who had continued to support and went in at the left corner. The Wigan-bound prop had already had an impact on the game when he took Sezer’s pass and almost floated past Welsby as the last line of defence in the first half. It was pretty average from Welsby but you can’t be good at everything.
Walters celebrated with the enthusiasm of any future Wiganer scoring against Saints. Yet replays showed that the Leeds chasers were offside from the kick and had not given Welsby the 10 metres grace which is his right. It was a needless breach of discipline which must have driven Smith quite insane but which Wellens was probably hugely grateful for.
It would turn out to be crucial, not least because Saints grabbed the initiative through Welsby’s first try just a minute later, courtesy of that Hopoate offload. Makinson’s missed conversion was genuinely surprising and no small disappointment. Before the end of the night the responsibility for slotting the ball through the aitches would come back to Dodd.
It remains to be seen whether that is where it will stay. I had always assumed that the nature of the injury which robbed Dodd of 10 months of his career in 2022 was preventing him from resuming the role. If he is fit enough to do it regularly then he should. Makinson has been unfortunate at times - not least in seeing his perfectly good conversion of Hopoate’s try waved away by the touch judges earlier in the evening, or in just failing from the touchline with an effort that would have taken the semi-final to extra time a week ago - but if the option is there the time is probably right to hand the job back to Dodd.
The introduction of Mbye in place of Roby coincided with a period of Rhino dominance. Not to say there was any blame on Mbye for this. The former Dragon and Wests Tiger enjoyed a perfectly serviceable debut. It was probably more the absence of Roby as he took his rest which swung the game back in Leeds’ favour. Yet Saints defended superbly for a long time before the dam finally broke.
The champions had spent 10 solid minutes or more defending in their own half as Leeds twice turned down opportunities to take two easy points. That proved fruitful as eventually Nene McDonald went over in the right corner from Ritchie Myler’s scrappy looking pass which bounced before finding its target. It was checked upstairs to see if McDonnell had got a hand to the ball and knocked it forward before McDonald picked it up and grounded it. Yet there was no Leeds touch. A typically nerveless Martin conversion put Leeds up 18-16 with only just over a quarter of an hour left. It was coming down to the wire between these two again. The end of an epic trilogy neared.
The epicentre of the action changed when Roby was re-introduced. Wellens employed him not in his usual dummy half role but more as a first receiver. His impact was immediate as he found Lomax whose short ball could not have been more perfect for a charging Welsby. He was over for what turned out to be the match winner before the Rhinos defenders could even think about reacting. Dodd’s one and only goal attempt was successful and Saints led for good at 22-18.
Roby was involved again when Saints almost stretched that lead into unassailable territory but Hurrell’s final tip-on pass to Makinson went forward before the former golden boot winner could cross. So Leeds had one more chance, which was promptly taken away from them in the last minute by a fortunate - for Saints at any rate - knock on call by Moore on Sezer. All seemed fine when the former Giant got up to try to play-the-ball in Saints territory and give his side a shot. Yet Moore ruled that the halfback had knocked on in the act of playing the ball. Understandably miffed, Sezer wrapped the game up in a great big bow for Saints when he offered Moore a bit too much of his opinion on the decision and was penalised for dissent.
When it comes to stats we have seen the impact that Lees had but there were two other Saints who travelled further with ball in hand. Knowles had one of his most progressive games in attack for some time with 125 metres, just two ahead of Hurrell on 123. Then came Lees and - as if to further illustrate that he can’t quite do absolutely everything - Welsby fell just short of the century mark on 97. But his contributions were worth more than any number of metres.
The Rhinos top man in the metres category was McDonald with a game high 167. Yet it probably says something about Leeds’ attacking limitations and Saints’ defensive strength that the centre was the only one in blue to break 100 metres.
Defensively Knowles pipped Lees to the title of Saints’ top tackler with 37 to the prop forward’s 36. Bell weighed in with 34 and there were 31 more for Roby. Perhaps indicative of their spells on top in the game Jarrod O’Connor was the only Rhino required to make more than 30 as he chipped in with 37.
Next up for Saints is a return to the scene of one of 2022’s worst beatings. In July of last year Woolf’s champions of past and future were run out of town by a scintillating Red Devils attacking display. Paul Rowley’s men hammered Saints 44-12 in the game which would see Regan Grace pick up the Achilles injury which would see to it that he would never turn out in the red vee again having already agreed to switch to rugby union.
Rowley’s team are not quite in that sort of form this time around. They sit seventh at the moment, outside the playoffs and on a five-game losing streak. They were larruped 42-0 by the Dragons in Perpignan just 24 hours after Saints earned their win over Leeds. It’s probably a good time to be playing them, but Wellens should remain wary of the fact that he still has an injury crisis and that the likes of Brodie Croft, Joe Burgess, Deon Cross, Ryan Brierley and Andy Ackers could transform into the cape-wearers they were last year at any time.
Saints;
Welsby, Makinson, Hurrell, Hopoate, Ritson, Lomax, Dodd, Delaney, Roby, Lees, Royle, Bell, Knowles. Interchanges: Norman, Mbye, Baxter, Davies.
Leeds: Myler, Fusitu’a, McDonald, Martin, Handley, Austin, Sezer, Oledzki, O’Connor, Walters, Bentley, McDonnell, Smith. Interchanges: Sangare, Lisone, Johnson, Holroyd
Referee: Liam Moore