Q&A: Paul Wellens response to Saints' Challenge Cup exit

Coach Paul Wellens was asked for his take on matters and for an explanation as to why the game unravelled as it did.

MC: Warrington started strongly and limited your field position – did Saints’ mistakes and forced passes come as a response to the way Warrington started?

PW: Potentially, but what we've got to understand is that teams don't come here now and roll over and have their bellies tickled.

You've got to earn everything. So if that is for 10 minutes, rolling your sleeves up and they're flying off the line, be prepared to get whacked.

That's the game.

And we haven't got quite enough of that at the moment and whether it is a forced pass or not quite nailing a play, it matters - particularly when you accumulate them all together.

MC: Who are you looking at there to steady that ship and to stop those things creeping into the team’s play?

PW: Well, we've got a lot of experienced players out on the field. So you look to a lot of them to give the team some direction, particularly when you're out there in the heat of battle you need cool heads.

You need a calmness, you need a clarity and I thought what we did today looked like we were just continuously trying to chase points and that wasn't what was required in the situation, particularly when it was 13-8.

We obviously made it much more difficult for ourselves because we lacked patience and it with a couple of half breaks where we kicked it away on play 4, it almost seemed like we wanted to score the try and we weren't prepared to show that little bit of patience.

MC: There was a long way to go after you fell behind after converting the penalty, but the players seemed to think it was 5 minutes to go and panic.

PW: Well, I was shocked with 18 minutes ago when we went for a short kick off. That's not us. I'm not saying that's a poor tactic - some teams do it, some teams don't.

But we don't. We kick the ball long there, we're aggressive in D and we work hard, we get the ball back on the full and we come after them again.

With 18 minutes to go and you need two tries, you don't need to be going for short kick offs, in my opinion.

But I thought that was a sign of where we were as a team. We almost wanted things to come a bit easier.

MC: There were individual errors from the youngest members of the team to the oldest, but is there a collective guilt going across 17 players there today?

PW: That is three weeks running now that we've done done a similar thing. Obviously in the Wigan game they made as many as us, so we kind of cancelled each other out.

But certainly in the last two weeks against Catalans and now Warrington, we've been by far the least disciplined team with the ball.

And for as good as we think we are when we're at our best, if you keep asking yourself to that level of defending and that amount of defending then you are always going to put yourself under pressure.

But also I was really disappointed with some of the tries that we did concede today, very uncharacteristic.

MC: They got you a few times on the edges. Perhaps you expect a team like Warrington to do that, but for a team that's so strong in defence to be caught out so many times, even the ones they that they didn’t convert, must be a worry.

PW: Well, it was concerning today because we started to do things that go out of what we would normally do out on the training field.

We're only going back a few weeks when people were talking about how impressive St Helens are defensively and how hard they had to break down.

So that team is very much still there, but we've got to get back out, practise harder, work harder, sacrifice more because things don't just happen for you. You have got to make them happen.

MC: Can you make to your team if you think players aren't doing it and if, as you are saying, three weeks running mistakes are happening. Have you got the ability to change and refresh things and drop people?

PW: I'm certainly going to have to look at what options are available there. I've got a group of five or six players who are champing at the bit for opportunity.

The team is going to be picked on form and players who are not quite doing it have to understand that being at this club that there’s a standard that you need to have when you pull on this jersey.

I suppose, obviously, emotions are kind of riding high a little bit at the moment, so I don't want to sit here and say I'm going to be dropping four or five, six players.

What I've got to do is think about the team next week and what's best. There's also a school of thought that the guys who are disappointed go out and make amends, but I thought that was the case this week.

So that is a lot of thinking for me through over the next few days, so I won't make me make decisions based on emotion.

What I do have to say is there's still a group of players in there who I care about.

There's a group of players in there who I believe in and although this disappointment is huge, I do feel that we're not a million miles off doing what we need to do to become that team again.

And generally that's around getting the basics of the game right.

MC: You have been round long enough to know what it feels like to get knocked out of the cup. And it does weigh heavily on the team’s support, doesn't it? It is still only April – how do you gee the team back up to attack the rest of the season?

PW: First of all I want the players to sting. I want them for over the next couple of days to be hurt by it.

If you are not hurt then you're at the wrong club – if you’re not hurt you're sat in the wrong seat.

I want that from the playing group, but then, as you quite rightly say, there's a response.

There's Super League, there's a competition that we're desperate to be successful in and we've got to turn our attentions.

There's no point dwelling on things for too long. We have to respond positively. That that's the challenge for us again next week.