SAINTS took import Will Hopoate off at half-time against Hull KR to protect him for bigger games ahead.

The full-back, who has injury woes for chunks of his first season at the club, has a hamstring issue and did not appear for the second period, leaving Jack Welsby to switch to the team’s rear and James Roby to cover in the halves.

He helped Saints establish a 20-0 lead at the break, but Rovers fought back and it was three tries appearance in the second half before Kristian Woolf’s men closed out a 38-12 success.

Woolf said: “He’s tight through the hamstring and obviously he’s had some issues there before so as a precaution we wanted to take him off.

“I think everyone can see how key a player he is to us and how good a player he is. He showed his class last week (in Sunday’s 60-6 win at Hull) and he showed in that first 40 minutes again tonight and was a big part of what put us in a good position.

“We need to make sure we look after him so that we’ve got him for the really important games.

“If we were a little bit healthier in the outside backs I wouldn’t have played him on such a short turnaround, with the fact that he hasn’t been there week on week building that real resilience.

“We don’t know where it’s at just yet. We’ve got to figure out where it’s at tomorrow and we’ll know what we should do next week or what we’re doing over the next three games that we’ve got over a seven-day period. But what we won’t be doing is risking him “You talk about trusting players and what I know we can get out of him, I know that he’s a type of player that we want in our team come semi-finals footy.

“He’s had a lot of setbacks. He’s a strong man.”

His exit from the game against the Robins meant there was disruption within the spine of the team, including Roby picking up things in the halves while Joey Lussick took over at hooker.

“The disruption in the halves, we’ve had that since round eight when Lewis Dodd went down and we’ve had nothing but disruption there since round eight, but we’re sitting in a good position and we’ve found a way to manage it,” said Woolf.

“There’s a group of blokes there who just get on with it, find a way to get the job done and compete every week.

“There’s blokes who come in in different positions, we’ve got young blokes who come in and fill spots and they will keep doing that because that’s what this team is built on. If it is more disruption (moving forward) we’d love to not have it, but we’ll find a way to get out of it.”