SAINTS look set to keep their game style simple for the rest of the season.
Paul Wellens and his coaching team made their side's match-play less complicated when they ended a five-match losing streak away to Hull FC at the weekend.
It was a decision taken due to the loss of key attacking orchestrators Jonny Lomax (three-match suspension) and Jack Welsby (eight-week hamstring injury) from the previous week’s defeat at Leigh Leopards.
The way Saints went about their business was more of a wearing-down process of their opposition, and they took advantage of depleted Hull’s fatigue later in the game with some eye-catching tries.
Wellens said it is a game plan they will stick with for the time being, and potentially when skipper Lomax returns later this month.
“We’ll look at the situation when Jonny returns,” said Wellens ahead of Saints’ clash with Salford Red Devils on Thursday night.
“Jonny is a great player, as is Jack Welsby. But maybe the simple approach needs to stay and remain.
“We started the season with a very similar approach.
“As coaches at times, we maybe try and evolve things and improve things but at the same time you maybe complicate things as well and that’s maybe what we’ve probably done at certain points throughout the course of the year, so stripping things back at this moment in time we feel will help us and maybe it’s the blueprint for us moving forward towards the end of the season.”
Reflecting on how the approach worked for them at Hull, Wellens said: “I think any team, when you miss two key players like Jonny and Jack, would be affected by that.
“But I loved the way our group responded on the weekend.
“We gave them a pretty simple game plan and one that they stuck to from minute one to minute 80 and then got some rewards off the back of that.
“Hopefully we can do something similar this week.
“We know that we have to start again – a lot of the joy that we got at the back end of the game last week was because of the hard work that we put in for the first 15 to 20 minutes.
“It was 0-0 for a long period at the start of that game and that’s something that we need to understand and keep in mind as we go into this week’s match.”
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