I was impressed with Owens

Same here. If he keeps on track then he has a future. He showed imense everything really for a 17 year old debutant.

My problem is that he's been out of form all season so far, that's 12 games. And if anything he's starting to look worse than he did before.



I think he's allowed a brainfart

Well, that's what form is like isn't it? It can go for ages and then just come back or be around for ages and just go. He may be out of form all season. Wello was a couple of seasons ago, for instance.


Not that kind of brainfart he bloody isn't! And in a knock out game too!

Tremendous fightback by Widnes,IMO another 10 minutes and they would have won by 10 points
Saints will clearly play much better and could actually go on and win the CC without a doubt

Doubt it. Saints have been playing like that for most of this season. There is a serious attitude problem among some of our players.

Most players being consistently poor are dropped. I don't see Shenton as being that vital he's immune to being dropped and we can't afford to carry him all year.



I couldn't believe he'd done it. I did imagine your reaction to Meli's brainfart losing the ball late on though

I agree. But if he is dropped then Perry and LMS should be too as neither of them is earning their keep at present either.


Me neither. Apparently he did it against Wigan too but got away with it on that occasion.




He just lived up to my expectations of him. Apparently he knocked on against Cas too. But he was also back to his old tricks of passing the ball to someone else to take forward. It was only a matter of time with Meli. I do so hope he is not offered a new contract.

Some interesting thoughts on the game.


Swift looked a real handfull with ball in hand. Reminded me a bit of Tomkins in that he is built like a starving sparrow yet ha the ability to bounce out of tackles. His fielding of bombs was exemplary. Could he turn out to be our future fullback??


Josh Jones hard to think that he is only 18 years old. He is a real handful with the ball in hand and defensively sound.

Lance. Looked like a deliberate tactic to keep him out of the action for the first 20 mins then introduce him into the midfield. Suspect he may be playing with a knock.

Clough a one man yardage machine, our best forward along with Lafranchi.

Roby playing well but then committed a complete brainfart that nearly lost us the game.

Overall performance, pretty solid in a going through the motions sort of way for the first 65 mins. Then Roby went off and we collapsed.

Paul Wellens. Not captain material at present , spends the match screaming abuse at his fellow players when a mistake is made making wind mills with his arms. For me this puts undue pressure on the other players and distracts them from the job in hand. Paul is a passionate player but need to temper his emotions when dealing with his team mates.
Joynt was a great captain not because of what he said but what he did. For me a quiet word in the ear is better than a whirling dervish

I watched a lot of saints u20s last year and also watched some Widnes u20s and I've been very very impressed with jack owen. I think he's got potential to be top class fullback.

I was impressed with swifty today, he was a little naive in defence on two tries (I think) but he took some very good high balls and also looked good on the ball.

I was impressed with him in attack but not in defence (except under the high ball).

I think it was a needless risk, though, to play a noob in a knock out game.

So who would you have played? Jamie foster!! His defence can definitely not be trusted at the moment.

Agreed, it was a risk in a tricky knockout game and when ah van skipped past him i thought this could be a problem.

He's not a natural winger and looked a little lost in defence.

He's a good prospect as is jones who Brown said he likes.

In regards to Owen, I thought he looked a little leaden footed personally. As the saying goes there's no substitute for pace, which is something all top fullbacks have. Once upon a time even Wellens was speedy, well a little. That's not to say Owen won't be fine player but he looks a little on the heavy side to me.

I disagree with you about Wellens. This is one of the quietest (on the pitch) Saints teams I've seen in 20 odd years of watching them.
Joynt didn't have to be loud. The team was full of leaders with the likes of Long, Scully, Cunningham etc
Saints don't lack quality, they IMO lack leadership & direction. Wellens is doing most of it, at least last year we had Graham chipping in too.

We're missing that mean streak. The type of player that gets in the oppositions faces a bit. A player that away fans hate.

Indeed. We've never really replaced Jason Hooper, who played that role admirably.

I'd much prefer a sonny Nickle in that pack at the moment. Brown likes his forwards tough so maybe he will put a little fire in them.

Totally agree. They don't lack quality in the pack but they certainly lack that aggression, that mean streak. The type of forward/s were the opposition just think 'Oh Christ' (Although he lacked a bit of aggression too) when they come on the field.
I agree that type of player give away a few penalties but they gain you so much more.

On a positive note I thought Lomax, Jones, Roby and Cloughy had great games. On the negative side we have lost that mental toughness that Cunningham, Sculthorpe and Graham use to provide in bucket loads. We are a 60 min team and look like the Jeckyll and Hyde teams we had in the 1980's.
Agree totally obout our pack and no impact from the bench, don,t think it's a quick fix either. Someone needs to get inside the heads of the players that it's n 80 min game and can,t switch off anytime in a game now. Quite a lot of games lost this season were self inflicted where we have some how managed to find a way to lose, until we fix the mental toughness........we will always be this Jeckyl and Hyde team.

another Vila is what we need!

The important thing is we are in the hat for the next round. We did what we went there to do and for that we should be satisfied.

But let's not pull any punches here, it was a dreadful performance from start to finish. Widnes are a dreadful side, their defensive pattern is poor and they aren't particularly difficult to defend against IMO. Alot of the tries we conceded were pathetic, there were some shambolic one on one defending, poor options picked defensively and some lazy marker defence. We allowed Jon Clarke to dictate the ruck at times, which tells you how poor we were! We conceded 28 points in the 2nd half to the worst side in SL and the 1st two tries conceded in the 1st half weren't great from our perspective either. If we take Roby out of our team yesterday we'd have lost that game as practically every player bar him put in a below par or very poor display. Offensively, we picked the wrong option time and time again, our structure seemed to disappear and we made alot of basic errors. Our kicking game was the worst part of our performance, neither Lomax or Hohaia took any real control. Both our long and short kicking game was shocking and we never really pressurised Widnes with our kicking game. It was a dreadful performance individually and as a team and we cannot afford to play that badly again this season. Any other SL team would've beat us yesterday on that showing.

I understand the easter period takes it out of the players and I expected a poor standard game with some tiredness creeping in, but I didn't expect to witness that. It was up there with the Bradford display in terms of poor quality.

The players need to rest for the next few days and come back and expect some hard work, we need to be better than this Friday otherwise Widnes might sting us this time.

I'd suggest that fortunately for us Ah Van missed his kick and so we were lucky to end up with a win. No satisfaction. Just relief that we got lucky.

In that last 10 we went down to 12 men, Widnes had nothing to lose and they gained all the momentum, Meli's (I think it was him) mistake and playing too conservatively coming out all led to that Widnes fightback.

We shot ourselves in the foot unfortunately by taking the foot off the gas and nearly paid the ultimate price. Thankfully we just managed to scrape through into the next round.

That's no excuse. We went down to 12 men at Bradford but didn't concede a single try in that spell. Bradford are marginally better than Widnes I would suggest and therefore posed a greater threat.