SAINTS captain Jon Wilkin sees the loss to Hull FC as a blip rather than a setback in the bid to reach the Grand Final at Old Trafford, writes Mike Parsons.

Although his side have dropped out of the all-important semi-final places for the moment there are five remaining games in the Super 8s to put that right, starting at Leeds Rhinos tomorrow, Friday.

“In the grand scheme of things nothing’s changed,” said the back-row forward.

“We move on and now have to beat Leeds, which we needed to do anyway.

“We need to win more games than we lose in the Super 8s and we need to finish in the top four, that’s the simple thing.

“But we’ll do that by week-on-week producing good performances with the ball and without. Last Friday, with the ball we weren’t good enough.”

The current longest winning run by a Super League club, therefore, ended at four matches as Saints lost some of the momentum they had been building under Justin Holbrook.

“It’s a little bit of a test of character for us now but this season there have been bigger character tests,” he said.

“Let’s not forget, Hull are a very good side who are going to the Challenge Cup Final full of confidence and pipped us just by managing the conditions better.

“It’s a long way from when we got beat by Huddersfield or Wakefield at home.

“It’s a different animal now.

“We’re confident and we’re ramping up ready to play in the semi finals.

“Everybody’s enjoying working under Justin and we’re working hard for him – long may that continue.

“We’ve got to be conscious as a club that it’s about enjoyment.

“It’s entertainment, it should be fun and exciting, and we’ll try our best to excite our fans. We’ll do that with a smile on our faces as often as we can.

“There were not too many smiles after Friday night’s game but hopefully there’ll be more before the end of the year.”

It would be difficult to argue with his summary of the team’s last outing against Hull.

“I thought both sides were really poor with the ball. The conditions meant it was a dreadful game of rugby league but they probably played the conditions slightly better,” he said.

“Marc Sneyd was stood out the back just moving the ball a little bit and then kicking early. I think that really put us under pressure and we came up with too many errors to compete.

“We defended fantastically well but we didn’t have enough good quality ball in that second half to do anything.

“I think we just couldn’t get enough plays together, the ball control was poor and that’s purely and simply the difference.

“They played really simply and controlled the ball. We tried to play how we’ve been playing in the past few weeks which has been really effective but it didn’t work on this occasion, we didn’t adapt quickly enough.

“I thought we should have been 18 to 20 points up in that first half because we made three or four chances but kept missing them, and all of a sudden it was 6-6.

“We had the best of it in that first half but we weren’t clinical enough. I thought we looked more threatening than Hull with the ball but ultimately we didn’t hold the ball long enough to really expose them.

“When it’s wet it’s more difficult to hold the ball. You have to adapt, being adaptable is really important and we didn’t adapt quickly enough.

“That’s the lesson for us. I thought the game was really tough and physical but we didn’t adapt to the intelligence side of the game and the skill side of the game quickly enough and that cost us.

“We’ve got to learn from that and move on.

“Grand Final night is quite often a wet night. We want to be there and if we want to be there we’re going to have to play in conditions like that.

“We’re disappointed because we’ve been playing really well and wanted to keep that momentum going and keep the pressure on to get into the top two or three.

“We slipped up but we’ll learn from it. We’ve been training hard, we’ve been pushed hard in training and that will help us going forward. We’ll bounce back.”