"BETTER than us in every area,” was the stark analysis from Saints coach Justin Holbrook after seeing his side suffer a 30-10 beating at home to Wigan.

The defeat scuppered Saints’ chance of lifting the League Leaders’ Shield tonight – but that was probably the least of the concerns arising from this match against their title rivals.

Flaky defence and an apparent lack of appreciation that Shaun Wane’s last visit to Saints as Wigan boss would see them fired up contributed to the Cherry and Whites deserving their emphatic win.

Holbrook said: “It was definitely not good enough – that is obvious.

“We had some chances in both halves but were not good enough to execute them.

“Full credit to Wigan, they were better than us in every area of the game.

“It is disappointing. Somebody said to me that you can’t have it your own way all the time.

“We had beaten them twice and wanted to beat them a third time.

“But I think we underestimated how much they wanted to beat us after beating them twice.

“They played that way and were better than us in every area of the game and thoroughly deserved to win convincingly.

Of the defensive errors, Holbrook said: “We were all over the shop, they completely out-played us and every time Wigan moved the ball they looked threatening and we were disjointed for most parts of the game.

"At some stage we will wrap it up, and we are still sitting in a good spot. But we have to make sure we play better than what we did tonight. If we don’t we won’t beat anybody.

“You don’t lose your ability to play. We didn’t play well and lost convincingly but we will move on.

"It is hard – we beat them twice and we thought we were ready to go again.

“They played the ball faster, they tackled stronger, executed their plays and looked a threat all of the time and we just fumbled our way through the 80 minutes.

“It is a learning curve for us again tonight. We will have to learn from it and move on.”