SAINTS’ end of season review with the players was wrapped up in the week following their play-off exit at Warrington – and those players, bar the internationals, now have time off until pre-season training starts in mid November.

But for the head coach Paul Wellens and his staff, that review process has continued with a deep dive into all aspects of a year that ended without silverware and their lowest league position since their eighth-placed finish in 1994.

There is significant mitigation in last year’s overall performance – with an injury list that left no player untouched during a challenging season.

But all that has to be stripped away when ruthlessly looking at what went wrong and where improvements are needed for Saints to challenge for honours in 2025.

Having taken a couple of weeks to think about the season as a whole, once the bitter disappointment of their Golden Point exit at Warrington subsided, Wellens explains the process

He said: “We undergo a pretty stringent review process with all players, and look at areas where they've been good, look at areas where they can improve and we also do that from a team perspective as well.

“So we are still in in the process of that, but I am very mindful of some of the areas where we can improve.”

The review process with 30-odd players plus the staff is a time-consuming activity, but one considered an absolute necessity.

Wellens added: “It gives the players a platform to talk about the season from a personal perspective, but also gives them an opportunity to air their opinions on what we're doing well and where we can improve.”

The players sit down with me to the coach, but also head of medical Nathan Mill, head of performance Matt Daniels and James Roby with his role around the culture and environment.

“We all come from different angles, which we hope leaves no stone unturned when reviewing the season. It's pretty stringent, but the one that we feel is absolutely necessary.”

Given the travails of the year – the disappointing Challenge Cup exit, the run of late summer defeats and an injury list that lengthened week-to-week – plenty were relieved to see the year end to allow the reset button to be pressed.

But that is not a take Wellens shares.

“From a personal perspective, 'relief' is probably not the word I would use.

“I'm still disappointed and still feel despite the way that the season was and the challenges that we faced, we put ourselves in a strong position and I think that reflected in our performance at Warrington,” he said.

“But we certainly left ourselves with a lot to do - that can't be denied.

"Some of those factors were external but some are very much internal and I have to be honest and say despite the troubles that we've had, there's a number of games in the season where we let ourselves down badly.

“Had we won those games we could have given ourselves home semi-final rather than away one, and maybe a better chance of getting to Old Trafford.

“You have got to dive in there and perhaps look at the games and the things you did.”

Injuries – and how they responded and coped with significant absentees – is one aspect that Wellens says he has to learn from and come up with a strategy going forward.

Wellens said: “At the start of the year we probably never envisaged being in the situation that that we found ourselves in with injuries.

“What this review process allows us to do is bulletproof our worst-case scenario.

“So next year, if we if we find ourselves in a similar predicament, it's how we handle that and we're learning lessons from that.

“We don't want to find ourselves in that position, obviously, and will do everything possible to make sure that doesn't happen but it's really important that we learn the lessons from those tough experiences, particularly in the midway part of the season.”

Saints started the 2024 well enough, with their only loss in the first two months being a narrow home defeat by Salford after playing the last 35 minutes with 12 men following Mark Percival’s red card.

Despite beating Wigan on Good Friday, some of the defeats that followed were particularly hard to recover from, namely the 31-8 Warrington cup loss and the 40-20 defeat at Hull KR – both suffered when reasonably, if not completely, healthy.

Those two defeats hung over the year somewhat, even when they were piecing a run of wins together and still in the top two – but the season went south as soon as injuries struck.

The summer’s five-match losing run started with two disappointing two-point defeats at Salford in June and then a dismal one at home to Castleford, but ended with woeful a 46-4 shellacking at Leigh.

It ended up becoming a run of 10 losses from the team’s final 14 games – and even if the last of those was by the tightest of margins it was the sort of run Saints had not encountered since the back end of the 2004 campaign under Ian Millward, admittedly without the indignity of the 70 and 64-point hidings of that run-in.

It was nevertheless a shock to the system for a side that only so recently been clocking up four-in-a-row Super League titles.

Wellens said: “We didn't handle the disappointment of losing well enough and we got frustrated as a group and I include staff and players, including myself in that.

“That frustration comes from a place of care because you're not happy with the results that you are getting in and you want to sticking to what we are and who we are as a club.

“By that I mean what you saw in the game at Warrington at the end of the season, continue to compete hard for each other, continue to value what each other does, bring your best effort every week.

“That's part and parcel of it.

“I also think quite often throughout the course of the year we didn't win the big moments in certain games.

“Ultimately, if you are going to be successful - as a number of players in this team have been in the past – you have to win those big moments in big games, and we didn't get that right this year.”

Saints’ record against the fellow top six members – Wigan, Hull KR, Warrington, Salford and Leigh – was a particular concern given they won only three of 15 matches against those teams.

Admittedly, Saints were missing a lot of key personnel in some of those encounters – including the Magic Weekend defeat by Wigan.

Wellens throws in the caveat of injuries to preface his analysis on defeats, but goes back to straying from the club’s identity as being a key factor in their drop off.

“The ‘who we are’ bit and ‘how we are as a team’ is something we should never have strayed away from and my learn as a coach is that I allowed not just myself but the team and individuals to stray away from it.

“It came from a place of care because you are searching for answers to get results, however, it didn’t work for us,” he said.