Of course anyone complaining any week of the season about the refereeing of players not being 10m or markers square at the PTB has a point - and if Holbrook looks very closely at any Saints game this season he might spot one or two instances of his own team doing it - but to raise that as a point after losing the Cup is cheap

I was thinking the same, always good for a laugh.
He's been on here but just can't bring himself to congratulate us.

In the pubs after the game around Wembley. A good number of Saints fans came over to us and shook our hands and congratulated us on our win.
They never even mentioned the Knowles no try incident until I did. Their response was "it happened in the first few minutes there was plenty of time to do something about it"...
The Saints club doing this makes a mockery of the decent gracious fans that they have..

The Saints fans know only too well the game was lost through unforced (and uncharacteristic - until semis/finals that is!) errors.

That said - I thought we were pretty clearly the dominant team for long spells until panic set in for the last twenty minutes chasing the game. If you get your noses in front when dominant the game changes.

But as I've said before, congrats to Wire on a deserved win.

p.s. does anyone know if player stats are available for the Final?

p.p.s. if any of you on here are the Wire supporting family who were rightly enjoying a bottle of bubbly in the Hilton bar after the game - what a good bunch, hope you enjoyed your night.

If you count long spells as the first 18 minutes then yes. A clear second best for the remaining 62.

Each to their own - from my view (and I haven't watched it back on TV) we were clearly dominant for a reasonable period before we scored, you had spent a period struggling to get out of your 20 and looked whacked. I honestly thought at that point you would fold as ll the momentum was with us.

Cue an easy missed conversion that must have given the Warrington lads a huge lift and the Saints lads a body blow after thinking they were back to within one score.

Happy to admit I watched it after a couple of beers and have little intention of watching the match back, so could be wrong



Would like to see the stats - it felt at the game like we were having an easier time coming out of yardage but the ridiculous number of errors, lots of them horribly unenforced, were giving Wire easy territory that they weren't necessarily finding it easy to get with the ball in hand.

Well I've lovingly watched it over a dozen times like a sad case. I've also seen the stats and it's a perfect example of how stats can tell you very little about a game. They never tell you, where, when and how these things happened.

Serious question in terms of metres made does it just mean from where the players start their runs and not just those over the advantage line? If the former it explains why Thompson's stats often look much better than Hill and Cooper's - even in games (like Sat) where he's been comfortably outplayed. Plus 95% of Thommo's tackles are third man in. Very different types of props ours v theirs. Saints' front 3 get rightful plaudits but I genuinely wouldn't swap our front three for theirs.

Roby made 65 tackles that tells you we had a lot of the ball. Momumental effort by him that.

Don't know how they are calculated to be honest.

It woudn't surprise me if our stats looked better - my impression of big chunks of the game were Saints on top, Wire tackling heroically and also kciking extremely well on the back of sets where they had struggled in yardage.

Clearly added to that they made the big plays and minimised errors when it counted.

Not taking anything away from Wire, if anything my view of the game makes the Wire win all the more admirable given the courage it required.

I heard it was 61. Lazy git, needs to up his work rate.

Metres: Wire 1445 Saints 1684
.
Missed Tackles: Wire 51 Saints 34
.
Clean Breaks: Wire 4 Saints 10
-
Offloads: Wire 6 Saints 16

Tackles %: Wire 87 Saints 93
.
Completions: Wire 85% Saints 65%
.
Errors: [size=150Wire 5 Saints 18[/size

Despite a lot of the superior stats by Saints I assume those were gained playing in our own half because Wire had a much superior kicking game and the pressure applied in the process to force us into so many errors.

Thanks - to be fair that seems to tally with what I thought I was watching.

That completion rate - eugh.

Does someone want to put the penalty count up? Although it wont quite fit with saints mantra of blaming poor officiating for their defeat.

Where were the clean breaks, when were the breaks? When/where were the missed tackles? Where were the metres mostly made? (I could be wrong but I think Makinson was comfortably the highest metre maker - that'll tell you where those metres were made). Where/when were the offloads - were they advantageous?

The most telling stat of the game is 18-4 - that's pretty conclusive.

Stats can tell you a lot of things. However, we aren't playing Top Trumps, and the only one that really matters is the final score.

If Roby made 66 tackles, to me, it highlights a few things

His durability
Saints too dependant on him (a la Houghton at Hull)
Some of the Saints pack aren't pulling their weight.
He needs a lay down, after that effort, in those conditions /circumstances

Thompson and Walmsley are well short of pulling their defensive weight. They'd need to up that considerably if they want to 'storm the NRL' as promised.

Absolutely, they can be interesting
but there is only one stat that counts.

I think people seem to think I'm trying to detract from Wire on asking for the stats - I'm absolutely not. They are just an interesting supplement to a view of the game.

Clean breaks, id say were in the first half, naqaima and makinson, made a few down the right edge which was worrisome, however our defence bust a gut and got back to make the tackles, and stop the little offloads and broken play areas that lomax and fages thrive off.

Despite what i just said, i think we did a reasonable Job overall on naqaima who has given us the s down left side this year

Thompson was ok, walmsley was off the pace, i didnt even notice amor was on the field and ashworth isnt a good replacement for lees.

Our problem was Ashworth (2) Paulo (5) Knowles (4) Amor (6) Peyroux (6) with the number of carries I would think the Wire equivalent were double those figures. We did miss Matty Lees energy running at the wire pack.
.
Don't know the penalty count yet, the stats are only being drip fed at the moment.

Saints made quite a few marauding runs on their sets of six ,going nearly the length of the field at times , but my take is that our defence coupled with better execution of the scoring chances on offer won us the game.

Pretty sure it was 4-2 in saints favour again

Walmsley was awful. He offered very little going forward. You compare his performance to Mike Cooper who's half his size and it was a poor effort.

A lad his size should be busting tackles most weeks but I genuinley can't remember the last time he did so.

He also went off after 20 mins and as far as I could see he never came back on till 50-60 mins.

Didn't Patton halt Alex W?

Tries Wire 3 Saints 1
Goals Wire 3 Saints 0
[size=150Score Wire 18 Saints 4[/size

Record will show we won, the rest is irrelevant.