Dave Hadfield: Warriors Put Old Foes In Their Place…

ANY threat that Wigan might yet be overhauled by their neighbours and biggest rivals has been averted.

Saints’ recent resurgence carried that danger, but they were put firmly in their place by a rare derby nilling.

It was a strange match, with Saints having as much possession and position as the Warriors, but doing virtually nothing with it. A big slice of the credit for that must go to Wigan’s terrific defence; not for the first time this season, that was the difference between them and their opponents.

The other thing that set them apart and made this look a thoroughly one-sided game was the quality of their finishing. For that they have Anthony Geiling largely to thank. The Cook lslander is still feeling his way back from injury, but he looked fit enough as he scored the first three Wigan tries that effectively won them the match.

Geiling is an unusual player: technically he does a lot of things wrong and he crops up in places where he isn’t meant to be. Dan Sarginson is a bit like that as well. Between the two of them, they ensure that, however structured Wigan might be in other respects, there will always be a dash of the unorthodox and the unpredictable about them.

He popped up unexpectedly for his first two tries and was certainly somewhere Saints didn’t expect him to be when he picked Jordan Turner’s pocket to go the length of the field for his hat-trick.

It all helped to make up for the absence of Dom Manredi, whose season has been ended by injury. The good thing about a sick-list like Wigan’s, though, is that, by the time you get to the end of it, the original victims are ready to return. Filling in the gaps, however, has made unlikely heroes of some players.

If you had told Shaun Wane at the start of the season that he would be without his favourite player in the whole wide world, Micky Mcllorum, for virtually the entire campaign, he would have had you removed from the premises. Correction: He would have you removed you himself (continued below)

And if you had told a dispassionate observer that Sam Powell would play hooker without missing more than the occasional game – and play it, despite his relatively light frame, the way Wane wants it played – there would have been more than an eyebrow raised. But Powell has not just been a fixture; he has been a positive asset and deserves to have his role more widely recognised than it is.

A word too for the contribution of Matty Smith against the former club he is widely expected to rejoin at the end of the season. Of the Wigan halfbacks, it was George Williams who did most of the eye-catching stuff, including a cracking fourth try, but it was Smith who kept the ship on an even keel.

His drop-goal to make it a 13-point lead was his eighth of the season and none of them has been irrelevant to the needs of the moment.

Mind you, there would have been no 13-point lead if Saints had taken advantage of a potentially pivotal passage of play just before half-time.

Twice within a minute Wigan gave Saints the ball in a mouth-watering attacking position – Oliver Gildart  dropping a high kick and Liam Farrell knocking on by his ankles – and twice Saints gave it straight back to them.

It was, as Keiron Cunningham acknowledged afterwards, not the way to give yourself any chance at all of beating Wigan. “You can’t keep giving them the ball,” he said. “We haven’t done ourselves justice here tonight.” There were some solid reasons for that. Mark Percival’s absence weakened the centres and, without the suspended Liam Walsh, Theo Fages looked like he was starting out in Super league anew. His decision-making was flawed and
his execution nervous.

One spell worthy of mention, though, was Alex Walmsley’s first. He has not, until recently, been quite the force be was last season. On Friday night, he looked like he had been sent out with strict instructions to put absolutely everything into his first 15 minutes. That, at least, was what he did.

One of the many things I don’t fully understand this season is Cunningham‘s reluctance to have Walmsley and Kyle Amor on the paddock at the same time. That was when they were at their most destructive last season. Perhaps it is a treat being saved for the play-offs.