Hohaia calls Saints chairman’s claims “embarrassing”

It would appear that the spat between St Helens and Lance Hohaia has plenty of life in it yet.

Hohaia claimed he had been treated badly following several concussions, going on to state he wasn’t given the correct time to heal which forced his to “walk away”. St Helens issued a response strongly denying comments they described as “despicable”.

Last night, St Helens chairman Eamonn McManus weighed in on the matter through a club statement.

He said: “His misstatements have wrongly damaged the respected and hard earned reputation of one of the world’s great rugby league clubs. However, I reserve my real anger for the damage and wrongdoing to our highly reputable and leading medical and rugby staff, each of whom could not have looked after Lance more professionally. Their reputations, livelihoods and lives have been wrongly maligned and undermined by his utterly untrue assertions. This is unacceptable and will not be tolerated by us.”

However speaking to BBC Sport, Hohaia has contested a number of McManus’ claims and said it was embarrassing that he “would try to draw a correlation between my mental state and my university marks”.

He went on to say: “I was awarded an aggregated score on my final exam based on my previous assignments out of compassion, which allowed me to pass.”

Meanwhile, Hohaia has also insisted that he has no criticisms of the club’s medical team.

“The lack of support that I felt was from management and was in reference specifically to how my retirement and the subsequent time after was handled, not how I was treated after the Grand Final incident,” said Hohaia.

“Eamonn has taken my wider statement about the club not supporting me as an attack against the entire club and the team, which is simply not the case.”