I’m paraphrasing, but earlier this season Paul Wellens said something along the lines of ‘18 points should be enough to win any game of rugby league’.
The purists among us balked at this proclamation. It was anti-rugby. It wasn’t even true, or so we thought. Before Friday night’s attritional 6-0 win over Leeds Rhinos at Headingley Saints had won only three times this season when scoring 18 points or fewer. They have lost on all six of the other occasions that they failed to better that tally.
Though still the second best defence in Super League in terms of points conceded this is not the rock solid and resilient team of the Kristian Woolf era. It cannot always be relied on. More often than not Saints will need to surpass Wellens’ magic number to secure the win. And if they want to keep me awake.
But that second best defence turned up on this occasion. Between them Matty Lees and Morgan Knowles put in Steele Retchless-esque performances, tackling anything that moved - and a few Leeds forwards who seemed not to - as Saints stifled Brad Arthur’s recently improved side. The Saints pair made a preposterous 109 tackles between them with Lees coming up with 58 in an 80-minute stint of indefatigable industry.
The duck egg next to the Rhinos is no mean feat. The only other side to have nilled them in Super League this year is Catalans Dragons in a truly dreadful 11-0 success in early March. And that was a vastly different Leeds from the one which has been busy toppling Hull KR, Leigh and Warrington in recent weeks.
Aside from the Dragons the team which came closest to shutting the Rhinos out before this game was…er…Saints. Wellens’ side triumphed 18-4 at home against the blue and amber a month ago. In four meetings with the Rhinos in league and cup in 2025 Saints have conceded only 35 points at an average of less than nine points per game.
One dreadful performance at Newcastle aside Saints seem to have what NRL types might call the wood over the West Yorkshire outfit in 2025. Even the sin-binning of Agnatius Paasi with 15 minutes to go for a euphemistically careless forearm to the head of Alfie Edgell was not enough to see them yield and relinquish their spankingly clean sheet. Though it does help when legend in his own back yard Jake Connor is throwing cut out balls to punters in the third row.
Paasi was issued with three penalty points by the disciplinary committee for his indiscretion as was Jonny Lomax for a dangerous tackle early in the game. If you understand the new disciplinary system you are one up on me but the bottom line is that both have avoided suspension and are available this week. Which would have been unimaginable this time last season when suspensions were very much in vogue. Yet so would the prospect of Nigel Wood making decisions on the game’s future once more but here we are.
As impressive as this Saints performance was I also found it excruciating. I hate these sorts of games. I want to see mistakes, missed tackles, breaks, scoring opportunities. I want to see Lees - an England squad member considered among the best front rowers in Super League - average more than 82 metres per game with ball in hand. And let me add that he fell some way short of that modest median in this one. Too busy tackling. Completed set after completed set leaves me cold irrespective of how difficult it is to play 80 minutes at prop and continuously tackle Mikolaj Oledzki.
I do have to doff my metaphorical cap to Owen Dagnall both for his overall performance and in particular for providing the decisive moment in the contest. Fed by Tristan Sailor close to the left touchline the youngster got rid of Harry Newman and stepped inside Lachie Miller to score the game’s only try. It was a classy moment from Dagnall who is beginning to make a case for his inclusion even when Jack Welsby, Lewis Murphy and Deon Cross are all fit again.
Dagnall was superb but he wasn’t infallible by any means. Later, his inability to diffuse a Leeds bomb led to the Rhinos’ best opportunity to bother the scoreboard operator but Miller was rightly adjudged to have nudged Mark Percival in the back in the build up to Edgell’s effort. He may not have grounded it anyway as the Saints defence scrambled to push him towards touch.
Grumbles notwithstanding I commend the red vee boys for the achievement of the clean sheet and for securing another unlikely win which makes them all but a certainty for the playoffs. They were briefly a vertigo inducing third in the table before the Leopards surprised Rovers on Saturday (July 12).
Currently fourth, Saints have 24 points. A couple of wins over Castleford and one over Huddersfield will get them to the 30-point mark which came with a top six spot last year and almost certainly will again. Wins against the better sides still on the schedule are almost a bonus now. So with a modicum of pressure off will the Saints attack liven things up a bit when Leigh come to town on Thursday?
They’ll be handicapped by the lack of a natural number nine. Both Daryl Clark and Jake Burns left the Headingley scene with head injuries and are ruled out of the visit of Adrian Lam’s side due to concussion protocols. As it stands the only man likely to be in the squad with any regular Super League experience at hooker is Moses Mbye and he has been playing halfback for the last few weeks.
It would seem a good time then to recall George Whitby to the side. He has missed the last two after sustaining a concussion but was fit enough to turn out for the reserves on the eve of this win. Unfortunately Noah Stephens will not feature after he had surgery for a thumb injury which is likely to keep him out for a couple of months. Not that he was used much anyway. Jake Wingfield has been mystifyingly preferred and his occasional stints at dummy half would seem to hint towards a more justifiable inclusion for this one.
Somehow this will be Saints’ first meeting with Leigh in 2025 despite having met both Leeds and Salford three times each in the madcap world of loop fixtures. It’s a tricky assignment but it’s an opportunity. As unlikely as it seemed after Magic or chastening defeats by Hull KR and Wigan earlier in the year Saints could still finish in the top three. Higher if you believe the Twitter theories about a Hull KR collapse. Which I don’t. But now that Saints are starting to beat other playoff contenders instead of merely punching down on bottom feeders a top three finish doesn’t seem that fanciful.
But it will probably take more than 18 points to get the run for home started with a win against the Leopards.
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