On this day three years ago Jack Welsby wrote himself into Saints folklore…
The year 2020 was a strange one. And not only strange but fairly miserable too. It was dominated by the outbreak of Covid-19, a potentially deadly virus which began hospitalising and eventually killing people in their tens of thousands all over the world. It wasn’t until near the end of the year that a vaccine was developed which not only helped to stop the spread of this modern plague but also reduced the symptoms in most sufferers so that hospitalisation and death were considerably less likely.
The outbreak had a profound effect on our daily lives. Once the Tory weasels running the country stopped dithering and ‘followed the science’, we were subjected to a series of lockdowns. Being seen outside for longer than your designated exercise period was suddenly an offence. If you worked you did it from home, and if you couldn’t do it from home you were furloughed. Nobody knew what furloughing was until 2020, but it was actually the word applied to the act of staying at home and not doing your job, while only being paid 80% of your wages. At least you were stretching your vocabulary.
Shops, bars, restaurants and any other public places you care to mention were all ordered to close. Except for the supermarkets which were considered essential (after all you have to eat, right?) and their staff were classed as key workers. If you were a key worker, or you ventured into a supermarket then you had to do so wearing a surgical mask to help stop the spread of droplets from your mouth and nose which could potentially foist the virus on to others. You didn’t have to be suffering any ill effects from it to be carrying it and therefore to pass it on. That was the conundrum. For many Covid-19 was a mild illness like any other and for some others it could be nothing at all. But as long as there were those for whom it meant hospitalisation, ventilators and potentially death we all had to do our bit. Even as our mental health levels dipped.
Something else which was affected was the world of sport. Even the all-conquering football Premier League, an institution which it was previously thought would not stop for anything but a nuclear holocaust, was forced to shut down for three months just as it was approaching the business end of the season. Liverpool were miles ahead in the title race and the prospect of handing them the trophy without having to play the remaining games was discussed as a realistic possibility. In the event it did restart with its grandiose, self-regarding ‘project restart’ branding. All games were televised but no fans were allowed in the stadia as all large gatherings were strictly prohibited. Except Tory piss-ups as it turned out. To make up for the lack of atmosphere fake crowd noise was shoe-horned into the broadcasts. I’m not sure how the lack of atmosphere was made up for at Tory piss-ups.
Rugby league suffered too. Super League was still in its first few rounds when the season was suspended indefinitely. When it returned in August it was very different. Games behind closed doors were a theme as they were in football, but unlike the round ball game not all of the competing clubs were able to host their own matches. Our very own Saints were one club whose home was deemed worthy of doing so when it all restarted. Later, once the vaccine was developed, the stadium would become one of the region’s major hubs for the rollout of the jab which eventually brought us back to something close to normality.
A quick glance at the 2020 league table by the end of the regular season will show you something about the effects of Covid-19. It was meant to have been a 27-game season played out between 12 clubs. Yet by the end there were only 11, with Toronto Wolfpack withdrawing from their one and only season in the top flight to date. The Canadian club cited financial problems caused by the economic effects of Covid and its associated lockdowns. They were widely pilloried as it emerged that they’d been having trouble paying their players. They still exist but a return to Super League doesn’t appear close.
No team played more than the 19 league fixtures managed by Wakefield Trinity. Eventual Grand Finalists Saints and Wigan managed 18 each. Catalans Dragons only turned out 13 times. That’s poor, but perhaps we should not be too hard on the French side given that they managed to avoid the course of action taken by the Wolfpack. Some others played 17 times, and yet others only 16. A look at the table now might prompt you to wonder when the rest of the fixtures are going to take place, but that was your lot.
The chief reason for this disjointed mess was the fact that postponements or even cancellations of fixtures at short notice were rife. A team didn’t even need to have players infected with the virus to call off a game. They just needed to have enough players considered to have been in close contact with someone infected with the virus and then all bets were off. Super League did try to combat this at times by shuffling fixtures around to make sure there was a game for our broadcasting overlords to show but it didn’t always pan out that way. As much as some people would still buy into it, you really can’t have Saints playing Wigan every week and expect the outside world to take you seriously or show any interest in your product.
The rules were changed also. Scrums were taboo, it being established that the act of packing down created a wind tunnel or some such science guff, which had the potential to spread the virus. Which in turn would of course mean more postponements and potentially, depending on who infected players came into contact with away from the field, could cause serious health risks to the general public.
It was not thought that professional athletes were at too much risk as they are among the fittest people in the population. The more serious cases of Covid-19 were generally endured by the elderly or those with existing underlying conditions. I myself was written to seven months after the fact to suggest that I might like to self-isolate for my own protection. At the time I was awaiting a kidney transplant. But since I didn’t have a date for the surgery I was not going to self isolate completely. Not that there were very many places I could go anyway.
The re-examination of the rules gave birth to the six again rule, still the topic of much debate and set for another tweak ahead of the 2024 season. It stated that any offences committed by defenders at the ruck would no longer result in a full penalty, but instead would see the tackle count restart for the team in possession. Clubs soon got a step ahead of this one and began deliberately giving away set restarts on tackle one when their opponents had possession in their own territory. Better to have to make one more tackle a long way from your own line than to let an opponent get a quick play the ball and start haring at you before your defence is set.
In 2024 it looks likely that offences of this nature committed within the opponents 40-metre line will now result in a full penalty, with offences elsewhere punished with a set restart. This is the way of things in the NRL, and if there is one thing that Super League likes to do well it is to copy the NRL. After all, it is by far the most successful rugby league competition in the world. I’d like to think that some of the hairstyles and facial hair choices of the players won’t be emulated on this side of the world but frankly it seems inevitable that the wild mullet and tash combo will soon be a regular sight on the RL fields of England and France.
Back in 2020 the coaches were still working out ways of getting round the new rules and hadn’t quite mastered the art. Well, it was enough just to get through your day during those dark times without having to conjure up new ways of bending the rules.
There was a significant change to the Saints personnel by the time of the restart. With the economics of Covid being what they were the players were asked to take a pay cut while they were out of action and the fans were unable to pay their money to come through the gate. Most did, but Luke Thompson chose instead to force through a move to the NRL with Canterbury Bulldogs. The move had looked on the cards at the end of the season in any case with his contract about to run out, but it was agreed by all parties that he would leave early. He will soon pitch back up in St Helens wearing the cherry and white of Wigan. While I am not normally one for booing former players when they return there’ll be precious little sympathy for him or pontification on That Saints Blog if the prop forward hears it from his old fans come Good Friday.
In his stead Saints pulled off a bit of a coup in persuading James Graham to return to the club for a one season swan song. Graham had been a huge success in the Australian competition after leaving Saints in 2011 on the back of five consecutive losing Grand Finals between 2007-11. Of all the men in the Saints squad after the resumption it was he who you most wished could have a winners ring this time. It was delivered to him in some style in the end.
For what it was worth in such a lopsided league table, Saints carried off the League Leaders Shield, winning it on points difference from Wigan. This was despite the fact that the Warriors had won 18-6 at Saints on the final day of the regular season. Both teams finished with 26 points from their 18 fixtures but Saints had a better points scored percentage. That is the number of points scored divided by the number of points conceded, a typically brilliant innovation cooked up to allow for the possibility that teams tied on points could have played a different number of games from each other. This was not the case with Saints and Wigan who had both played 18 so they could have gone with old fashioned points difference. But everything was new and contrived in 2020. If only we’d had a new government we might have saved a few thousand lives.
Only four teams made the playoffs but that had been the case in prior seasons which were unaffected by incurable viruses. So it was that Saints took on Catalans Dragons – the Catalans Dragons who had only played 13 league games – in one semi-final while Wigan met Hull FC in the other. Neither was much of a contest. Saints walloped the Dragons 48-2 with a hat-trick of tries for Kevin Naiqama, two from Lachlan Coote and further scores from Regan Grace, Jonny Lomax and James Bentley. Meanwhile over in Wigan the Warriors pumped the black and whites 29-2 with scores from Joe Burgess, Harry Smith, Zak Hardaker, Jake Bibby and Bevan French.
Yet the city of Hull would still feature in the Grand Final, played on 27 November due to the extension of the season caused by the suspension. FC’s KCom stadium was chosen as the venue for the big event, the one and only time in the history of Super League Grand Finals since the first in 1998 that it has not been staged at Manchester United’s Old Trafford. The traditional Grand Final venue was unavailable due to United’s involvement in Champions League fixtures at that time of the year.
Again there were no fans in attendance so it scarcely mattered where the game was held. It just meant a little more travelling for the teams involved and their staff. Maybe the hike across the M62 – so feared by rugby league fans who lie awake praying for a fixture list full of derbies – took its toll on the teams. What followed was 80 minutes of the most turgid drudgery in the history of rugby league.
Only the savage tension of the occasion kept it watchable as both sides stoically refused to make more than one pass off the ruck. Instead they repeatedly crashed into each other while deluded onlookers marvelled at the quality of the defence on show. Look, I’m not suggesting I could tackle Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook (although…) but if you only have to deal with a big daft, slow forward running at you straight from the ruck you should be able to make the tackle often enough if that is literally your job. Which is precisely what unfolded. When I see posts on social media from people claiming to be watching the whole thing back again I immediately assume that they are lying or that they’ve gone mad. I defy anyone to sit through this game again with all the tension taken out of it and not be tempted to fast forward to the last five seconds. Maybe that is the bit they are watching back. I’ve just done it in the name of research for this piece. It’s really still quite good fun. But the rest of it? Nah. Bin…as the cool kids say.
The only score of the first half came right on the half-time hooter when Coote converted a penalty goal. It took until 15 minutes before time for Wigan to respond, but when they did it was through Bibby’s try in the right hand corner. The conversion was missed but Adrian Lam’s side led 4-2 with the clock on their side. If only six points had been mustered between the sides in the first 65 minutes it was a fairly safe bet that there wouldn’t be that many more in the final 15.
Saints were offered a way back in when Jackson Hastings clobbered Theo Fages around his surgically attached scrum cap, allowing Coote to convert his second penalty to level the scores at 4-4. Poor old Jackson had not wanted to play for dirty Wigan in the first place but it was no surprise to see him turn into a product of his environment and become a head shot merchant when the pressure was really on. Thankfully for him he soon found an escape route to Newcastle Knights in the NRL. As Coote landed the resultant penalty Hastings must have begun contemplating losing to Saints in the Grand Final for the second year in succession having been part of the Salford Red Devils side who came up short against Justin Holbrook’s Saints a year earlier. It would be his fate.
Before that were surely headed for golden point extra time. As sure as Morgan Smithies is headed for your cruciate ligament. Nothing could prevent that now, could it? With literally two seconds on the clock Saints had possession just inside Wigan territory. Tommy Makinson’s drop-goal in the 2019 Grand Final remains his only one in his 315 appearances for Saints to date. Nevertheless he decided that with time running out he would have another pop. Well, it had worked the previous year so why not? Standing just inside the Wigan 40m area he launched his latest effort towards the posts.
It looked promising. It had plenty of height and the direction was almost spot on. Almost. Alas, it wasn’t quite accurate enough. Not for what he had originally intended anyway. It cannoned off the right hand upright as he looked, bounced in the field of play and back over the Wigan try line. Jack Welsby, who I would like to introduce at this late juncture as the central character of this tale, hared after it along with French. Welsby is no slouch as they say in the Big Book Of Sports Commentator Observations but you wouldn’t fancy him in a straight race with French. Fortunately, it wasn’t a straight race. The ball hit the turf again and took a diversion off one of its points away from the Wigan fullback and in favour of Welsby, on this occasion playing at centre.
Welsby is one of those players for whom the first yard is between the ears. He correctly anticipated where the ball would bounce and was on hand to get to it first. All that remained was the question of whether he would be able to ground it before it crossed the dead ball line. Which he did, just about. The try was checked for offside and to see whether there is anything in the rule book about whether you are allowed to humiliate Wigan in this fashion. It turns out you are, so Chris Kendall finally awarded the most dramatic of tries to end the most ordinary of Grand Finals. The close ups of a mortified Lam in the immediate aftermath would be too sad to even look at if he hadn’t brought it all upon himself by choosing to coach Wigan.
The magical moment turned Welsby into an instant hero this side of Billinge Lump despite his origins. It is a moment which deserves to be remembered with Sergio Aguero and Michael Thomas’ last minute title-winning goals for Manchester City and Arsenal respectively, with Chris Joynt’s Wide To West miracle against Bradford at Knowsley Road in 2000 and with Michael Kasprowicz not really gloving one to Geraint Jones off Steve Harmison at Edgbaston but being given out anyway in 2005.
A barmy ending to a barmy season which was, in its own weird little way, somehow fitting. Enjoy it again here…