SAINTS’ last gasp 25-24 defeat at the hands of Castleford was “what they deserved”, according to coach Keiron Cunningham.

The champions, who moved to the top of the table last weekend, may have surrendered their lofty position after just one game after a decidedly off-colour performance that was littered with handling errors and silly mistakes.

Cunningham, who has heaped praise on his team in recent weeks, was pretty scathing about the performance at the Jungle.

The Saints boss said: "I felt the game went away from us when we pulled on the shirt before we took to the field.

"It is hard to be critical of the team as they have been phenomenal for the last few weeks and I felt both sides showed a hangover from their big games last week.

"We were awful in that first half, but Cas were just as awful as us with the amount of ball we dropped.

"In the second half, Cas decided to have more want and vigour about them. You can't play the way we did at Cas and expect to get anything out of the game.

“We didn't deserve to win it. If we would have scored it would have been an injustice to Cas. We got what we deserved and we have to improve.”

There was a noticeable flatness about Saints’ game – a possible consequence of last week’s derby win.

But Cunningham was not accepting that as an excuse.

"You could blame the after effects of the Wigan game but I thought mentally the guys came here with a soft attitude,” he said.

“Perhaps they felt they just had to turn up. Leeds did that last week and got hurt. Cas are a good side and are in the top four for a reason. They are well coached.

"I have no qualms with the result and it would have been an injustice if we had won it."

Saints were hanging on at the end after the sin-binning of Mark Percival for an unnecessary flop after Shannon McDonnell had pulled off a tremendous tackle on Denny Solomona.

And a penalty, conceded by Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook, allowed the home side to level before a James Roby knock on at the scrum gave Cas the opportunity to win the game.

"I have no complaints over the sin-binning. You can't drop in the tackle and it was a stupid thing to do. We ended up under the pump more as a result.

“You could question some of the decisions at the end; they could have gone either way but I'm not blaming the ref or anyone else,” Cunningham said.

"We did our best from minute one to lose the game. We dropped the ball on our first set and I was hoping at half time we could have scraped something, have that will and want, but we didn't have it. In the second half we didn't complete a set for 15 minutes. That has to be a record.

"It is tough to be critical of them as they have been super, but you have to be good every week now. It takes the shine off the last few weeks."

Cunningham explained that Adam Swift was taken off to hospital as a precaution after being taken off with a head/neck injury, and he will wait for the scan results on McDonnell’s lower leg injury, sustained while turning to run and cover a kick, in the next few days.