ST HELENS went down 28-10 to Leigh Leopards at the Leigh Sports Village last night.
After the game, Saints head coach Paul Wellens spoke to the press: “I think, particularly defensively, and particularly in and around the ruck, things got way too quick. That takes your energy away.
“At the time, they had both Brad Dwyer and Ipape on the field at the same time, running from nine. but he said when we give ourselves too much to do from a defensive point of view and they say it took away our energy levels.
“Alex Walmsley failed his head assessment. Again, obviously, I think that impacted us, particularly when you’re already missing Morgan Knowles through the middle of the field.
“However, what I will say there is that moving forward in a play -off game in two weeks’ time and hopefully beyond that, there’s going to be times where we are faced with adversity and we’ve got to handle it better than probably what we did. tonight. You need to handle the first half better because you’re going 12-0 down.
“I think in the set-for-set period, we concede a penalty, give up field position, they moved the ball and we lost a bit of connection with our edge defence. That is frustrating because that’s something that we’ve been doing really, really well for a prolonged period of time now. So it certainly gives us a focus going into the next few weeks and little things that we need to work on.
“I thought the second try that we can see, I’d have to see that again. I thought it was a little bit harsh, but that’s not to take away from the responsibility that we need to take on ourselves to find those improvements.
“I don’t sit here and feel we’re a million miles off. I think there’s some factors at play there which are hurting us at this moment in time, but certainly the bits that are within our control, we have to really take responsibility for.”
Wellens did concede that he needs to know his most potent spine combination after tinkering yet again.
“That’s our 10th combination in the spine this season. I will hold my hands up to know that that’s way too much. However, there are circumstances surrounding why we’ve had to do that at times.
“Obviously, we want to play George Whitby in games because it’s important for his development. We’ve had Jack (Welsby) out of the team for a while.
“We have been searching to try and find what is our most consistent and strongest combination. So, yes, again, a bit of thinking for me to do, but we didn’t lose the game tonight because of the spine.”