St Helens RLFC 38 Hulll KR 12, Saints coach's comments

There were parts of Saints’ game that had a feel of play-offs football about them, especially in a first half in which they assembled a 20-0 lead.

“I thought that we played with a really good intensity for the majority of that game,” said Saints head coach Kristian Woolf.

“I was really happy with what we did in that first 40 minutes in particular and for long periods in the second half.

“What I thought we did really well was that I thought we had a great balance. I thought we played some great footy. It was a little bit different to last week, the team that we played had a real effort for the whole 80 minutes and kept coming at us as well. We had to work hard to find all of our points.

“In that first half when we had to go wave after wave of attack, we had a real patience and a bit of discipline about how we when about it. I thought that was great from us.

“We are preparing for the bigger games. We need to have an intensity, we need to have discipline, we need to have a mindset where we can attack but at the same time we’ve got to have a discipline about what we do with the ball. And again for most parts I thought we did a really good job.

“Hull KR really turned up, they really challenged us and we had to be good to beat them. And even when we got on top they showed they were still willing to chance their hand and they challenged us in different ways because they were willing to chance their hand. And they made it difficult for us to score tries and that’s the type of game we needed.

“Hull KR came up with a good couple of tries in that second half. It was one of those periods where they came up with a couple of miracle plays that they probably couldn’t do twice, but we can certainly be better on at least two of those.

“But we were good enough for really long periods. We did some really good things. At least when they found their tries they had to come up with those miracle plays to put themselves in that position.”