Everything Paul Rowley said on St Helens loss, Matty Lees injury and Jake Davies decision

Paul Rowley spoke to the media following St Helens’ humbling 32-0 defeat to Wigan Warriors. Here’s what the Saints boss had to say.

Thoughts on the performance

I thought it was quite an arm wrestle for long parts of the game I thought. But they own some really big moments from start to finish. Most of the big moments, to be honest, and they made their own luck in that respect by putting themselves in a position to do so, having the energy and excitement to do so at the right times. And some moments we could control, some we couldn’t, you know, so.

What we’ve learned in this game is that you can change things around and you can score a lot of points in a short space of time. In that 2nd half, we started strong and dominated territory in field position, but just didn’t get the points.

But again, I think most of us will be disappointed in the fact that we didn’t put ourselves in the picture by having enough excitement and energy at the right times, and yeah, we didn’t force being masters of our own destiny in that respect.

Matty Lees’ injury

I don’t think it’s the same injury, but I think it’s a bad one, a bad knee injury that doesn’t look too good.

Daryl Clark’s disallowed try potentially changing the game

It could have, but there’s a lot of other incidents that could have changed the game and things that we could have controlled. We can’t hold our hat on that one. It was a big one, that’s for sure. 
But again, credit to Wigan, for owning those moments, they were more forthcoming when it mattered. And yeah, and they showed the energy, like I said, before the excitement at the key times, whether that’d be chasing a loose ball, chasing a kick, claiming a dropout, you know, there are times there we could have forced dropouts and we just didn’t quite have that energy or, like I said before, that effort to get the job done.

If you look at it from a statistical part of you, our stats were very impressive, but the only stat that matters really is the scoreline and that was far from impressive.

Was not selecting Jake Davies difficult?

Yeah, it wasn’t hard. 
I needed three props. I’d made the right decision and so there were no dramas.

Jack Welsby’s sin-bin

He was sin binned because he insitigated in the referee’s eyes a penalty to get a Captain’s Challenge in. A new one. It’s the rules. I didn’t know it was a sin binning so I guess it’s a professional foul. It’s a new one, but the rules are the rules. There are no complaints.