'Fundamental errors' - St Helens coach Paul Wellens dissects derby defeat to Wigan Warriors

Wigan were 12-2 ahead at half-time thanks to first half tries from Abbas Miski and Jai Field, with the latter scoring his second to put Matt Peet’s side in an 18-2 lead.

But St Helens found some rhythm in the second half and staged a fightback through tries from Lewis Murphy and Agnatius Paasi, but Miski’s try late on in the game sealed a 24-14 win for the hosts at the Brick Community Stadium.

“A lot of the pressure that we sustained in the first 40 minutes was self-inflicted,” Wellens said in his post-match press conference. “It wasn’t errors playing rugby, but errors at the play-the-ball, and just not quite getting those areas right.

“The conditions change quite quickly, but you’ve got to be good enough to adapt to that. You can have one (error) maybe, but we had two, three, four, five or six, and that’s just way too many in a game of this magnitude against the quality of the opposition we were coming up against.

“I think all their points came from us giving up field position through cheap errors. Two tries from kicks and one at the end where we spilt a ball, but systemically, we weren’t really getting broken down that much. You could say the same for them, there were two good defensive sides on show, but when you give teams like Wigan more field position than you’d like to, Bevan (French) came up with a kick to Jai, and Jai scored a try which was our only real defensive system breakdown, so there’s a lot to like about our performance but we can’t keep having the same conversation around how we’re not quite winning big games through our own lack of concentration at times.

“We had the ball for some long periods, we got through some sets, and Wigan started to make some errors. We got our hands on the ball, Jack (Welsby) started to look more threatening as did Tristan (Sailor), what we’ve got to be is a little bit more patient and hard-nosed, not make those errors early on in the game, and that might just come a little bit sooner in the game for us. But I was really proud of the way we finished the game, and I’ll be honest, when we got our final try, I felt like we had a good chance of going on to win the game, but it just wasn’t to be.

“I think as coaches we’ve got to see how we can put them in different situations and quite often you go back to basics, small play-the-ball drills, challenge them, wet the ball, make it a bit uncomfortable, just so we’re taking care of what we’re doing because the frustration was we weren’t making errors by moving the ball to an edge and looking threatening, just making basic fundamental errors which were real killers for us.”

Wellens also paid tribute to homegrown talent George Whitby, who retained his place in the halves over club captain Jonny Lomax for the Good Friday clash and certainly didn’t disappoint on the big stage.

“I don’t think anybody comes away from this game today thinking that George Whitby is the reason Saints haven’t won, far from it,” said Wellens.

“I thought the way the kid handled the occasion was first class, but I’m not surprised by that. He kicked the ball effectively, and I think he’ll benefit so much from being involved in a game like this, and there’ll be a lot of lessons to be learned, but I thought he held up really well defensively. I can’t really fault George in the way he approached the game, I thought he was excellent for such a young man playing in that environment.”

The Saints have also suffered two injury blows, with forward Joe Batchelor sustaining a hamstring injury against Wigan, whilst Harry Robertson’s scans on his quad injury earlier this week have ruled him out for around six weeks.

“Joe Batchelor appears to have done his hamstring, so scans (will come),” said Wellens.

“We dealt with a bit of disruption this afternoon, Jon Bennison came off for a HIA and went back out there, we ended up with Morgan Knowles in the back-row at one point, then he went in at nine when Moses (Mbye) went off, so he was incredible today, an 80-minute performance covering a number of different roles. Joe Batchelor is the big concern coming out of the game.

“It’s looking like Harry is going to be a six-week lay-off so that’s a frustrating one for us, particularly in the outside backs, we’ve been chopping and changing there, and our combinations become slightly affected, but the way the lads have approached that has been really good. Matt Whitley for example, has played left centre, left wing, left back-row, right back-row, and has been happy to do it. I haven’t had one qualm from him about it, it’s about what is best for the team, and we’re going to need that again moving forward.”