PAUL WELLENS said St Helens’ defeat to Leigh Leopards was a “timely reminder” they need to improve to compete in the “big games”.

A five-match win streak came to an end and while Saints still look well set for a play-off place, the coach acknowledged they are not the finished product.

“It was a tough night with two good teams, and opportunities were quite limited out there,” said Wellens.

“What I can’t fault is the players’ effort, that was there in abundance and it has been for a number of weeks now, but it’s probably a timely reminder for us that we need to handle certain moments a bit better on both sides of the ball, because they are crucial in big games like that.”

Wellens particularly identified the first of Joe Ofahengaue’s two tries, saying: “That’s just not at our standard and not where we’ve been in recent weeks, so we’ll look to find those improvements.

“I’ve just said to the team that we’ve got to take our lessons from this. It’s been great winning games in the last few weeks and there hasn’t been a lack of effort, there’s been a lack of something else.

“That might be a little bit of detail stuff, a little bit of diligence, a little bit of smartness, Unforced errors, drifting, things like that matter in big games and we need to tidy them up.

“There’s a few seven-tackle sets that (we conceded) today and you might get one in a game, but I think they had three there. Things like that matter and they accumulate over the course of 80 minutes, particularly when we’re in the situation that we’re in at this moment in time.

“I’ll say again, I cannot fault the players’ efforts, but we’re going to need to be better in a few areas moving forward if we want to achieve what we want to achieve this year.

“Maybe we were a little bit conservative at times. We played a really attritional game for the last four or five weeks, which has served us well.

“However, as we all know, in big games, you’re going to need to nail a few opportunities. And it took us until the 79th minute today to do that.”