IT has taken James Roby just one game of the new season to remind the pretenders to his crown as Super League’s top hooker that the bar is set pretty high.

The long-serving Saints number nine waded through his now customary mountain of defensive work, chalking up a phenomenal 65 tackles, but still had the physical capacity to bump off defenders and play the ball quickly to set up the killer play against Catalans Dragons.

Roby appears to have benefited from the break after sitting out the Four Nations tour to Australia and New Zealand with his place taken by Man of Steel Daryl Clark.

While pundits have spent the last 12-months praising the new king of the nines, after some admittedly eye-catching displays, Roby has simply and modestly got on with his job.

Saints coach Keiron Cunningham, a former Great Britain hooker and master of dummy half play, was full of praise for his one-time protégé.

Cunningham said: “Robes is just phenomenal and the play he set up at the end came after he had made 65 tackles with not a minute’s rest.

“I rated myself as a bit of a good player, but Robes does things I couldn’t dream of doing.

“He is a natural and a freak of nature. He is a special player – up there with the likes of Greg Inglis as a special player.”

A lot of focus and media attention has been directed at Clark, who joined Warrington from Castleford in the off season after a storming 2014 that saw him voted Man of Steel.

However, Cunningham believes he has a way to go to match the overall contribution of his man.

“I watched him (Clark) at the weekend and he could not do what James Roby does. They are probably a similar body weight but Robes just plays 80 minutes and does all the work.

“Clark is a very good player in his own right, but we need a bit of a reality check with him and we shouldn’t give him too much too soon because that will probably hinder his development as one of our potential future internationals,” he said.

With Clark now playing for a top four side in Warrington the duel between the two is sure to be one of the compelling duels of Super League XX’s big set-piece games this year.