Saints will be among the last eight contenders for Challenge Cup glory after a second win in as many weeks against Leeds Rhinos at Headingley.
It was arguably the biggest game of 2024 so far given the knockout nature of it. Yet if anything it was slightly more comfortable than the 18-8 success seven days previously as Rohan Smith’s side again led early before falling in the kind of heap normally reserved for the England batting order.
Already without the injured Tommy Makinson and the suspended Mark Percival there was more bad news prior to kick-off for the visitors when halfback Lewis Dodd was ruled out with a groin problem. That meant Moses Mbye - hitherto the stand-in for Daryl Clark at hooker - had to move into the halves alongside skipper Jonny Lomax.
On Saints’ last visit Head Coach Paul Wellens filled the Percival shaped hole at centre with former Catalans Dragons back rower Matt Whitley in preference to Ben Davies. This week Davies discovered that not only is he behind Whitley in the pecking order for a place in the three-quarters but he’s also behind Sione Mata’utia. The former Newcastle Knight - who has been playing a lot of his rugby at prop to this point in 2024 - was now being asked to be one of the main creative forces on the edges. It wasn’t quite the equivalent of Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook at centre during some of the darker days of the Keiron Cunningham era but nor was it a particularly inspiring selection.
There was more logic in bringing in Curtis Sironen from the start in place of Joe Batchelor. Sironen missed the win over the Rhinos last week with back spasms but was fit enough to return. That gave Wellens a chance to use Batchelor - who had been out all season until last week - a little more sparingly from the bench.
Leeds welcomed back former Melbourne and Sydney Roosters centre Paul Momirowski from a shoulder injury. Smith promptly stuck him out on the wing in place of Luis Roberts, meaning Rhyse Martin continued at centre alongside Harry Newman. Up front Sam Lisone was free from suspension so took a place on the bench behind starting props Mikolaj Oledzki and Justin Sangare. Otherwise it was as you were from the league clash with former Saint James Bentley fit to start despite being sawn in half like Debbie McGee by Mata’utia in the last meeting.
Neither team started in particularly impressive fashion. Saints lost their best chance of the opening 10 minutes when Alex Walmsley spilled possession at the play-the-ball close to the Rhinos line. Meanwhile former Huddersfield Giants disaster Matt Frawley managed to hit an unsuspecting Oledzki with a pass on halfway putting paid to the home side’s first promising raid.
Another mental mistake led to the first points shortly after. Bentley was guilty of stripping the ball away from Lomax in a two-man tackle in a very kickable position. Lomax - who in the absence of all of Percival, Makinson and Dodd was the last man standing as far as goal-kicking was concerned - slotted it over and Saints led 2-0.
In short order after that he was able to double Saints’ lead. Andy Ackers lifted Matty Lees above a horizontal position in trying to bring the Saints prop to the ground. Despite the need to deter players from this sort of chicanery lest we get sued out of existence by Nick Fozzard’s lawyers - more on which later - Ackers’ tackle did not attract the attention of the Match Review Panel (MRP). But hey! Wait till you see what did! Ackers’ only punishment was having to watch Lomax push Saints out to a 4-0 lead inside the first 15 minutes.
Leeds started to huff and indeed puff. First Newman had to be wrestled into touch by Mata’utia and Waqa Blake 15 metres from the Saints line before Frawley again displayed some of that Giants form with what is known locally to him as an absolute bludger of a pass. Martin was the intended recipient but couldn’t take it as another attack fizzled out.
When Leeds did take the lead it was literally against the run of play. Saints had been pressing for a score themselves when Lomax’s attempted long ball to the left edge was snaffled by Newman. The England centre is a hard man to catch even if he is a very easy man to annoy. When all his would be pursuers start the chase facing in the opposite direction it’s never going to be much of a race. The BBC were so unsurprised by the outcome that they found time to focus on the Rhinos fans enjoying what would be the highlight of their evening rather than on the business of Newman dotting the ball down. Replays confirmed to confused viewers that he had, and that he’d left Martin with a simple conversion to put Leeds into a 6-4 lead.
If things had taken a turn for the worse at that point there was further adversity to come. Morgan Knowles left the scene with what Wellens has described as a hand injury. The Wales and England international (that’s rugby league, folks) has not been ruled out of the Good Friday derby yet and will be monitored this week. His exit brought George Delaney into the action and gave free rein to James Bell at the loose forward position.
Frawley’s quest to help Saints out continued five minutes before half-time when he employed nefarious means to stop Sironen scoring a try on his return. The ex-Manly back rower was all but over the line when Leeds’ most bewildering offseason signing ripped the ball away with a teammate in attendance. That looked like giving Lomax a simple opportunity to level the scores but as has often been the case with Saints goal-kickers since Lachlan Coote left the club the chance was glaringly spurned.
Just when it looked like Saints might go in to the break behind they struck a decisive blow. It seemed like the red vee had spent a lot of the first half in the Rhinos’ 20 metre area without reward so it was some relief when Clark finally made some pressure count. Scooting out of dummy half he made Oledzki, Ackers and Jarrod O’Connor miss on his way to his second try for Saints in all competitions. He’d opened his account in the opening night stroll over London Broncos but this one felt a little more key to the outcome even at the time with 40 minutes still to play. Lomax vanquished the memory of his miss from just moments before to kick his third goal of the night and send Saints in for some Wellens wisdom with a 10-6 lead.
It had absolutely no bearing on the outcome but there was a strange moment early in the second half that is worthy of a mention. If only so one of you can explain it to me. Saints had been awarded a penalty near their own line when Momirowski and Newman pushed the already tackled Waqa The Winger into touch.
I know. That works better if you say it rather than just writing it. And better still if he were actually a winger and not a centre being banished to the flanks to spare Wellens from having to pick Tee Ritson. But that’s the coach’s decision so @ him about it, not me.
Back to Waqa and that penalty, then. Mbye - who had taken over most of the tactical and territorial kicking following his emergency flit to the halves - just dabbed the ball into touch only a metre or two from the mark given to him by referee Chris Kendall. That left Saints still having to bring the ball out from around five metres from their own try line. Was this purely because he was fearful of missing touch by going long with such a narrow angle given where the offence occured? Or was there some other brilliant strategy at work which I have managed to miss despite two complete viewings of the full 80 minutes? Though to be fair I was a little bit tipsy during the live broadcast.
Jon Bennison has copped a lot of flak in recent weeks. Demonstrably not a winger but playing on the wing because that’s what he’s been told to do for the team, Bennison has become the scapegoat for the torturous lack of pace in this side. And while he’s no Usain Bolt he was about to make his mark on this one on what NFL aficionados call ‘both sides of the ball. Firstly he made an important defensive play when he knocked down a pass by Martin that would otherwise have hit Newman in space. Potentially that’s a try saver.
Before he could make his mark in an attacking sense something fairly predictable happened. All Hell broke loose around Bentley. For once he was not the main aggressor. His role had been to try - and ultimately fail - to get on the end of a Momirowski kick after he had sprinted down the right hand touchline, weighed up his options and plumped for the idea of kicking ahead for the angriest back rower since Ryan Bailey stood on a nail in his garden shed.
Bentley’s attempts to gather the kick were scuppered by the as yet and most unusually unmentioned Jack Welsby who effected a perfectly timed tackle. This really upset Tom Holroyd who began pushing Welsby towards and over the sideline and into the advertising boards. Seeing this, Clark saw fit to defend his fullback by exacting a kind of instant advertising board revenge on Holroyd. Due to the apathy of the broadcaster this match was only shown on the iPlayer and did not have the benefit or curse that is the video referee. So after some prolonged muttering with his touch judges Kendall dispatched both Holroyd and Clark to the sin bin. A second yellow card of his embryonic Saints career for Clark to go with those two tries since his move from Wolf Hall. Discipline problems? Saints?
Anyway it could all have been a cunning method of creating more space on the field. God knows that Saints weren’t finding too much of it with 13 on 13. Within a few minutes of the departures of Holroyd and Clark Wellens’ side went over for their second try of the night, bringing us seamlessly back around to Bennison.
Batchelor was into the fray by now and it was his kick which ricocheted off a Leeds defender and into the arms of Mbye. Leeds defenders stood around more in hope than expectation of a knock-on against Batchelor. As they hesitated Mbye quickly fed Konrad Hurrell who moved the ball on to Bennison to go over in the right corner. In five appearances this season he now has three tries. He’s not the answer on the wing but he’ll never let anyone down. He’s a symptom of a wilful abandonment of pace and flair in favour of the grind. He’s not the problem. Lomax produced a clutch touchline conversion to open the gap to 10 points at 16-6.
Leeds continued to have more problems of their own than solutions. They blew an increasingly rare second half opportunity when Lachie Miller joined the attacking line only to find the sideline on halfway with his attempted shift towards Martin and a virtually anonymous Ash Handley. The error was Miller’s night in microcosm. It never really got going for him. He spent much of the reduced time that he had possession compared to last week running sideways. Threatening to threaten without ever really doing it. It was a performance which lacked the directness of his previous one, certainly in the opening half hour of the league clash.
It wasn’t long after that debacle that Wellens thrust Walmsley back into the action for the final stages. The big prop’s impact was almost immediate. Bell put in a low kick close to the Leeds line which was touched by the hapless Frawley into Batchelor. It fell kindly for Walmsley who was as likely to be stopped as all of the boring moaning on social media about Sharon Shortle, the BBC’s commentator for the evening. Some of the comments made Joey Barton look like quite the feminist.
Walmsley’s try was his second of 2024 and his 51st in Saints colours since his 2013 debut. It also pretty much settled this issue against a more listless Leeds than had faced Saints a week previously. It scarcely mattered that Lomax missed a conversion that was much easier than his most recent effort following the Bennison try.
Things could have got worse for the hosts as Miller contrived to send the restart out before it had gone the requisite 10 metres. That led to a chance for Mbye which he unfortunately butchered by grounding a perfectly presentable pass from Bell. All of which is indicative of the attacking issues that Saints still have. Yet a side which has now kept opponents scoreless in six out of 12 40-minute periods of rugby league in 2024 was always going to be too strong for a Rhinos side which arguably punched itself out in the first match between these two. Given the choice they probably would not have accepted the rematch.
Their last chance fizzled out when Brodie Croft - a man who deservedly gets even less screen time in this play than Welsby - cut through Saints very late on only to see his inside ball to Cameron Smith put down by the Edward Scissorhanded Rhinos loose forward. To be fair he was probably just knackered at that stage of proceedings,
Now any Saints fan who knows about the match day parking situation at Tesco will know that our friends from the other side of the White Wall that is Billinge are our next opponents. The representatives of their fan base on social media are somewhat drunk on their recent success. They are the Super League and World Champions after all. Even if the latter owed much to two horrendously poor crimes against video refereeing. The talk among them earlier today (Monday) was that any bad weather that might transpire on Friday will be a ‘leveller’. As if Saints are nothing but a plucky non league side facing Real Madrid. That sounds like hubris to me.
The personnel problems Saints are currently experiencing might be driving the Wiganer’s 1980s-like arrogance to some extent. Although Percival will return for Saints there are still doubts about all of Makinson, Dodd and Knowles. Derby or not, none of them will be risked this early in the season if there is a chance of aggravating something and finding themselves missing from the side in the longer term.
As it stands today Bell will be out having been handed a one-match ban by the MRP for an alleged hip drop in this one. It’s one of those that is easy to miss, mostly because it occurs 40 times in a game without anybody noticing. Bell throws his arms around the Leeds player and then has to leave the ground momentarily before landing on the legs of the opponent as he falls. The only way to avoid this contact would have been to outlaw any sort of tackle from behind if there is already someone else making a tackle from in front. Let’s see how many trophies Wigan win if that rule ever comes in.
Regular readers will know that this column is wholly supportive of the crackdown on head contact in recent seasons and has very little sympathy with players who haven’t taken enough care to avoid clubbing an opponent across the head. Head contact has been heavily linked with degenerative brain diseases like CTE and dementia. If those looking to sue the game for negligence over protection from those conditions are successful it poses an existential threat to the entire sport in this country. We don’t have the millions of the NRL.
But can we say that same threat exists around alleged hip drops like the one Bell has been found guilty of? The line is that the harsher penalties are in place to show insurers that we are actively making the game safer. But if you’re selling me the idea that potential insurers have looked at Bell’s tackle and decided that it carries - to use the MRP phrase - an unacceptable risk - then I’m not buying. And if it were the case there would be far more players than Bell being picked out this week and they would be handing out lengthier bans.
The idea that there is a conspiracy against the side that have won four of the last five Super League titles is for the birds, but there does seem to be an inherent randomness to some of these verdicts we see week to week. I’m sure Saints are considering an appeal given the record of crack legal defender Mike Rush. Yet even then there is a chance that his taste for a hearing might work against us, particularly with the shambolic exoneration of Knowles before the 2022 Grand Final. If I was furious about it you can only imagine how fans of other club’s felt. Saints should tread carefully.
As I finish up for now ahead of my preview of the derby coming later in the week news has come through via a terrible, patronising radio presenter and two dart players of the draw for the Challenge Cup quarter-finals. Saints have a home tie with perennial springtime champions Warrington which - despite their habit of starting fast - doesn’t unduly concern me. No team has found as many ways to lose at Saints as Warrington over the course of the Super League era. I feel certain they will do so again.
Wigan have been drawn away at a Castleford side that looks increasingly Championship ready, while there will be a repeat of last year’s final with Hull KR taking on Leigh Leopards. In the final tie Huddersfield Giants go to Catalans Dragons.
But all that is for another time. It’s Wigan next up at home. A rare opportunity to put the sold out signs up and an even rarer opportunity to act like the underdog and bloody the nose of a side now convinced of its own greatness despite still employing Willie Isa.
It’s going to be a close call and a tough, physical game. But a nice change from playing Leeds away nonetheless.
Leeds: Miller, Momirowski, Newman, Martin, Handley, Croft, Frawley, Oledzki, Ackers, Sangare, Bentley, McDonnell, Smith. Interchanges: Lisone, Roberts, Holroyd, O’Connor
Saints: Welsby, Bennison, Hurrell, Mata’utia, Blake, Lomax, Mbye, Walmsley, Clark, Lees, Whitley, Sironen, Knowles. Interchanges: Bell, Wingfield, Batchelor, Delaney
Referee: Chris Kendall
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