I flew to Rhodes recently. The holiday was great, thanks for asking. We went back to the same hotel in the same resort we had been to in 2015, the Atrium Platinum in Ixia. It is a stunning place with a luxurious pool area, resplendent with its bridges which lead to the pool bar. If you don’t fancy that, and to be fair if you are a wheelchair user by yourself you might not because those bridges are pretty steep affairs, you can download the free app on your phone which allows you to order food and drink to be brought to your lounger. I didn’t move very far during the week.
Alas this is not a story about beautiful hotels in sun-baked locations off the coast of Greece. It is about the tragic and yet somehow predictable incompetence of Manchester Airport. There were no problems on the way out. We were met quickly after we landed, with the wheelchair at the door. To be fair to all airports in including the woeful and aforementioned Manchester, largely gone are the days when my wheelchair would be sent down to the carousel as if it were a piece of baggage no more important than Emma’s hair straighteners.
Despite the obvious advantage of having no language barrier to break down the staff at Manchester could not replicate the efficiency of their Greek counterparts and so things did not go quite so smoothly on the way back home. A four-hour flight that had already been delayed by around 75 minutes because of some vague explanation about air traffic control became an ordeal something closer to six hours. First there was the wait for the plane to take off because of the delay, but that had nothing on the wait to get off the plane as the bumbling staff at Manchester Airport fell over each other to blame everyone else but themselves for their failure to assist me. We landed at about 4.10 in the afternoon UK time, the plane having been originally scheduled for around 10.30am UK time but not leaving until around 11.45.
You can’t take a wheelchair with you on board an aeroplane. It has to go into the hold and so effectively is treated as luggage. Still, in 2019. Planes aren’t big enough particularly this flying 10A that we were on. We are probably decades away from ever having planes that are big enough to accommodate passengers remaining in their wheelchairs. There is no appetite for spending the money it would require to make the aeroplane door oh…..eight inches wider at either side or to widen the aisles by a similar distance. And then where do you store it while the flight is in progress? You wouldn’t want to remain in the wheelchair if your mobility is such that it prevents you from climbing steps but not from transferring on to a regular plane seat. It cannot be beyond the wit of man on the 50th anniversary of landing a man on the moon but currently this is the situation. So you have to wait for assistance to board and to disembark.
This is where our problems started. At first there was nothing, just some good natured banter between ourselves and the cabin crew about what a bind it is to have to wait until everyone else has got off the plane before we can think about leaving it. Some time passed and then the apologies started. Various members of the crew came to say how sorry they were that it was taking so long for my wheelchair to be brought to the door of the plane. They were definitely on their way and wouldn’t be long.
It wasn’t until the crew starting cleaning the plane that I started to really worry that this mythical assistance might not be arriving. Several of them were scurrying around us picking up empty food packets, cups, sweet wrappers and anything else left behind by a couple of hundred tired holidaymakers trying to while away a few hours in as pleasurable a manner as possible before reaching home. One crew member told us that they have around 90 minutes between landing and the time when the next set of passengers start to board for the next flight. It was more than possible that we could have been on our way to Palma in Majorca, which I know from past experience is lovely this time of year but not quite what we’d paid for.
More apologies followed and the blame game continued. Apparently it is not the responsibility of Jet2 or any other airline you might fly with to assist wheelchair users on and off aeroplanes. That is the job of a company called OCS, a criminally under-staffed company which played a major role in my last plane-related blog about Matt Byrne being refused assistance to board a flight to Nottingham from Dublin recently. Jet2 claim that they have asked whether they can take responsibility themselves, that they are willing to pay their own staff to make sure wheelchair users receive more timely assistance, but that their request has been turned down. Of course if airlines start doing crazy things like actually making sure that their wheelchair-using passengers can get off the plane before it takes off again then what little staff they do have at OCS will find themselves out of a job.
Over one hour passed before a beleaguered pair of OCS staff arrived to do their aisle chair thing. Basically their ‘assistance’ consists of strapping me to an aisle chair and physically lugging me backwards (or forwards depending on which direction takes us to the nearest exit) down the aisle and towards the door where my wheelchair waits in the ambulift. It’s not very sophisticated and if you are concerned for your dignity as a wheelchair user then flying is probably not for you. The shame of it all is that it takes over an hour to arrange this. They know the flight schedules so it is not as if wheelchair-using passengers are turning up unexpectedly, willy-nilly in a scandalous bid to live their lives with the spontaneity that every bugger else enjoys. Aeroplanes are the one form of transport for which I will conform to the tiresome rules about booking in advance if you are a wheelchair user. I won’t do it on trains. If I want to take a train journey on a whim then I bloody well will. All ‘assistance’ involves there is for one person to provide a tiny, portable ramp to negotiate the one or two steps up to the train from the platform. Quite why they cannot make over-ground trains level access like tube trains and trams is beyond my comprehension.
The tedium of the situation did not end once I was back in my wheelchair on the ambulift. They assigned me another, quite unnecessary assistant at this point, a girl who was probably about 18 but looked no older than Little Jimmy Osmond was when he belted out Long Haired Lover From Liverpool or whatever it was. What was she for? I still don’t know. I was in my chair, there are lifts to the baggage reclaim and anywhere else I needed to go to show documents, empty my bladder or wait for a bus to the car park. She kept following us, making that classic able-bodied person’s mistake of trying to push my chair without bothering to enquire whether I needed help with that or not. Mercifully she didn’t do it again once I had explained that I could do it myself. There are few things about being a wheelchair user that are worse than the fetish that the able bodied population have for putting their hands on you despite the fact that you have thrice politely declined their offer of help. Some people find it very difficult to accept our ability to perform a task that they would find difficult like pushing a wheelchair over the Steve Prescott Bridge.
Manchester Airport has previous for this sort of thing. A report in summer 2018 found that they had been ranked ‘poor’ for their service to disabled passengers. It was the second year running that they had received such a rating and by the looks of things they are very much going for what will probably be an unprecedented hat-trick. Some take the view that it is not important what you are remembered for, only that you are remembered. I have considered the continued failure of Manchester Airport and wondered whether I might just be better off flying from elsewhere in future. If I could guarantee that assistance would arrive quickly after the return flight it might actually be worth driving to a different part of the country to catch a flight. But although Manchester was the only airport in the UK ranked ‘poor’ in 2018 I have no confidence that a similar situation would not arise at Leeds-Bradford, East Midlands, Heathrow, Gatwick, Stanstead, Luton, Newcastle or anywhere else. The obvious alternative is Liverpool but I am not sure they have as much choice in terms of destination and there are some worrying if rather stereotypical horror stories doing the rounds about the wisdom of leaving your car there while you enjoy sunning yourself in wherever it might be.
My health problems might or might not prevent me from taking a foreign holiday next year, which if nothing else will offer some respite from the kind of shenanigans that almost led to my arrival in Palma for a bonus holiday that didn’t have the annual leave for and probably couldn’t afford.
Thursday, 18 July 2019
Wednesday, 19 June 2019
Our Next Prime Minister - Making Britain Shite Again
There’s a scene which opens Aaron Sorkin’s far too short-lived TV drama ‘The Newsroom’ in which Jeff Daniels’ TV news anchor Will McAvoy is speaking in a debate. One of the questions asked by an audience member, a female student, is about why America is the greatest country in the world.
“It’s not the greatest country in the world. That’s my answer…” Will says. Turning to a fellow panellist he adds;
“With a straight face, you’re gonna tell students that America is so star-spangled awesome that we’re the only ones in the world who have freedom? Canada has freedom. Japan has freedom. The UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, Belgium has freedom! There’s absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, number 4 in labor force and number 4 in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real and defense spending, where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies.”
“Now, none of this is the fault of a 20-year-old college student, but you, nonetheless, are, without a doubt, a member of the worst period generation period ever period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about! It sure used to be. We waged wars on poverty, not on poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were and we never beat our chest. We built great, big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases and we cultivated the world’s greatest artists AND the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, acted like men. We aspired to intelligence, we didn’t belittle it. It didn’t make us feel inferior.”
Will is talking about the United States of America here but he could easily have been responding to similarly bogus claims about Britain. The feeling that we have some kind of divine right to be world leaders prevails. Fifty-two percent of people voted to ‘take back control’ with Brexit in the 2016 EU referendum since when far right meatheads like Tommy Robinson have gained an alarming level of traction even if the other half of the population have held them up to the ridicule they deserve. The Tory leadership contest otherwise known as the race to become the next Prime Minister takes place against the backdrop of three years of this country tearing itself apart over the question of whether or not to leave the European Union. We are almost at the point of civil war and last night’s BBC TV debate between the leadership candidates, helpfully entitled ‘Our Next Prime Minister’ did the sum total of fuck all to allay my fears.
Will MacAvoy’s words are of course an entirely fictional dose of self-analysis. I cannot bring to mind any instance of any politician speaking with such disarming honesty about the state of his or her nation. Of the gruesome cast of this TV unspectacular only newcomer Rory Stewart appeared capable of anything but delusionary waffle. Emily Maitliss could not have been more out of her depth hosting if she had been presenting it under water, while hot-favourite Boris Johnson had clearly entered the whole thing determined to stick to his ill-conceived strategy of ignoring anything asked of him even or especially if it was a little bit awkward like….oh….I don’t know….do you accept that words have consequences after you compared Muslim women with letter-boxes? It needed a stronger personality than Maitliss to press this group of absolute frauds who have somehow managed to convince some that they are political heavyweights. Even when she pointed out that Johnson had compared the very sensitive Irish border situation to congestion charges in Islington he just chunnered on regardless, half-smirking the whole time as if appearing on the debate was just another public school jape. What time were we breaking for champers and a spot of rugger? Johnson could not have been playing the whole thing more for laughs if he had been filming another of his appearances on Have I Got News For You. If ever anyone should have stuck to comedy and left politics well alone it is this blathering buffoon. Prime Minister? Get directly to fuck and do not pass Go.
Coming into the debate Stewart was the only hope for anyone whose political leanings do not sit somewhere to the right of Steve Bannon. Yet having almost doubled his support in the latest ballot earlier in the day and so knocking Brexit-botching Dominic Raab out of the race the general consensus is that Stewart rather blew his opportunity. Displaying the kind of honesty not seen in a politician since Anne Widdecombe admitted she couldn’t dance Stewart spoke to BBC Newsnight’s Political Editor Nicholas Watt immediately after the debate and agreed that he had been ‘lacklustre’ and that he did not think the format worked for him. There was no live audience with questions posed byvetted very carefully selected individuals via video links from around the country. One such, James from Oxford, accused Stewart of being ‘out of touch’ when the only candidate that I would not willingly smash in the face with Eoin Morgan’s bat explained that tax cuts were not the best way to raise the money needed to increase the public spending which has been all but obliterated in Theresa, Dave and George’s austerity politics.
The candidates apparently drew lots to determine the order of seating from left to right of the screen. For once finding himself on the far right (as we looked) of Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove and Sajid Javid Stewart looked uncomfortable throughout. He had the look of….well…..someone who had been forced to spend an hour trying to convince four self-important preeners that you can’t just ‘get on with Brexit’ and that there is something called Parliament. He was exasperated enough to remove his tie midway through the hour, while at one point the bizarre open-legged sitting position he had chosen was dispensed with so that he could put a hand to his face to express his dismay at wasting an otherwise perfectly good Tuesday evening. Five point seven million people watching on TV felt they had done exactly the same, no doubt.
If TV debates are any indication of which way the vote will go then the next Prime Minister is not going to be Stewart. So where does that leave us? Like Johnson, Hunt Gove and Javid all boasted that if they absolutely had to they would take Britain out of the EU without a deal. Even a question from a lady in Southampton about how a no deal Brexit could destroy her family’s livelihood did not deter them from their course. The trouble is they talk in terms of a little pain for long term gain when it comes to a no deal Brexit but they do so fully in the knowledge that they personally will not be affected one iota by any damage to the UK economy. These are the poster boys for the ‘I’m Alright Jack’ brand of politics that has prevailed since Thatcherism turned us all into total and utter twats.
That’s not just me, some lefty keyboard masher offering that opinion. Let’s take a look at their voting records shall we? Starting with Hunt, a man who as Health Secretary inspired the first strike by junior doctors in over 40 years. Terrifyingly, Hunt was Shadow Minister for the Disabled in 2005 when thankfully we did not have to suffer a Tory government. He once co-authored a book calling for the NHS to be replaced by a scheme which would involve paying into a personal health account with the proviso that those who could not afford it would have it funded by the state. All of which has the unpleasant whiff of a two-tier health system but anyway, what other villainy has this bug-eyed blert been up to?
In 2012 he said he was in favour of reducing the abortion limit from 24 weeks to 12 weeks, another bloke who will never have to give birth who nevertheless feels he has an opinion worth listening to on what women should do with their bodies. Worse than that was his 2013 plan to charge foreign nationals to use the NHS. The mind boggles at what his definition of a foreign national might be, but having claimed that they cost the NHS £200million it was later discovered that the figure was closer to £33million, £21million of which has been recouped. Maths experts will have worked out that this leaves £12million, which is less than Hunt’s planned revamp would have cost.
Hunt has consistently voted against increasing welfare benefits at least in line with the increase in prices, against increases in benefits for those unable to work through illness or disability (that’s not me I hasten to add so no personal agenda there), and has generally voted against tax increases for the rich and in particular the bankers (with a ‘b’) that caused the financial crisis of the late 2000s. Victoria Derbyshire’s recent Freudian slip was about more than just the sound of this man’s name.
Then there is Gove, Education Secretary from 2010 to 2014 and currently the man responsible for ‘Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’. Like Stewart, Gove is a former Labour man who has had that moment of clarity that successful people enjoy when they realise that they can only become incredibly rich by supporting Labour politics. To become absurdly, pointlessly rich you have to rely on the Conservatives and their disaster capitalism.
Gove described himself in 2012 as ‘consitutionally incapable’ of leading the Conservative Party and yet here we are just seven short years later glued to our sets as he outlines exactly how totally different he is not from his supposed rival Johnson and the mirky, snake-like Hunt. Both think they can get Brexit ‘done’ as they would have it by the sheer force of their will. As Stewart put it earlier in the debate they are sitting in a room which contains one door to Brexit. The door runs through Parliament but instead of going through that door Gove and his ilk are sitting in the room shouting ‘Believe in Britain’. Exactly the kind of arrogant and baseless imperialism that Will MacAvoy was talking about in the opening scene of ‘The Newsroom’.
Talking of newsrooms another thing that Gove has in common with Johnson is that he has a background in journalism. He has transformed, Anakin Skywalker-like from the sort of person who goes out on strike with the trade unions in the 1990s to the sort who later describes evil overlord Rupert Murdoch as “one of the most impressive and significant figures of the last 50 years.” Gove is quite evidently someone whose opinion on any given subject depends entirely on what will be of most benefit to Michael Gove at the time. After this unedifying TV spectacle he laughably told Watt that he had won the debate, to which Watt retorted ‘how scientific is that? I have to admit at this point that I laughed out loud. Almost snorted. The kind of laugh I haven’t let out since 63 Up’s Paul fell flat on his face as a 7-year-old in 1964. Gove’s outlandish claim is about as scientific as Believe In Britain, I’d say.
There are some things that Gove is certain of and on which he will not be easily moved. Like Hunt, Gove has consistently voted against allowing European nationals to remain in the UK even if they had already been living here before the referendum. He has Hunt-esque views on what to do with welfare benefits and how much of them to distribute to the sick and disabled, and like Hunt he is rather fond of the idea of reducing social benefit to housing tenants deemed to have more bedrooms than they need. The bedroom tax is what Labour calls this policy. Gove wants that, but he doesn’t want an annual tax on expensive homes otherwise known as the mansion tax. The most worrying thing about Gove considering that he is the current man in charge of the government’s environmental policy is that he has often voted against the introduction of measures to prevent further climate change. He’s also not the man to vote for if you are a badger, as he has voted to have your lot culled on a couple of occasions.
Luckily for him, like the vast majority of us badgers have no say on who will become the next Tory leader. There have been many people who, quite understandably, have ignored the two television debates that have so far taken place because in the end the result will be decided not by the general public at large but by around 100,000-150,000 Conservative Party members. Aged, upstanding-member-of-the-community types who wear sensible sweaters and tank tops, go crown green bowling but never if their wives aren’t with them and think post-war rationing was the ‘good old days’. I can understand the view that none of this matters and so why don’t the television companies just leave them to sort out their own squabble and come back to us when they have come up with a new Prime Minister. I must admit that was my initial thought when I saw that the major television broadcasters would each be hosting their own debates between the ever-shrinking list of candidates (five will become four at the most later on today and, depending on how it goes, possibly even fewer). But on the other hand I don’t think it will do the rest of us, the people who wouldn’t vote Tory if our lives depended on it, any harm to keep an eye out and learn more about the men who aspire to take over from the absolute shit show that has been Theresa May.
I don’t know why but somehow the phrase shit show has just reminded me of our final contender, the boy Javid. Sajid Javid is currently the Home Secretary but he is an outsider for the top job. He received the lowest number of votes possible to survive (33) in Tuesday’s ballot and many think that as a result of that and his performance in the TV debate that he will quietly fall away and throw his weight behind Johnson’s campaign. Similar noises are being made about Stewart who has admitted to holding talks with Gove about some sort of alliance, although such a move looks unlikely given that Stewart still insists that he would only enter into an agreement on condition that it was he and not Gove leading the challenge to Johnson. For now all of that is speculation and conjecture so we have to assume that Javid will continue in the race. So what do we know about him?
Some would describe him as a class traitor. He was born in Rochdale in 1969, the son of a bus driver. His family moved to Bristol and lived in a flat above a shop, even though he was one of five brothers. He’s certainly a man who knows what it is like to go without, if he can remember that far back. And in any case, can there be such a thing as a class traitor when the whole idea of social mobility is to make it possible for someone to move between the different classes? Nobody is advocating that people should refrain from self-improvement. It is the gluttony and the who-gives-a-shit attitude to those left behind which sticks in what used to be termed the craw.
Javid’s election as Tory leader would be quite a social breakthrough. He would be the first Muslim to hold the position and of course the first to be Prime Minister. This might very well make the Tommy Robinson fans on Twitter illuminate with rage and could well lead to all kinds of milkshake-related rioting on the streets of Thanet South and Warrington. It might be worth grinning and bearing a couple of years of Tory rule until another General Election just for that. Tellingly all five candidates were adamant that there would be no General Election in the immediate aftermath of the Conservative leadership vote. Even Johnson, who Maitliss pointed out had demanded that Gordon Brown face the public vote when he took over the Premiership from Tony Blair in 2007, managed to cobble together some lame explanation about how circumstances are different this time because Brown was not taking over in the midst of a crisis like Brexit. Yes Boris, a crisis which you and your crony Gove went most of the way towards creating. Is anyone seeing an evil plot forming? It all seems to be transpiring exactly how Emperor Johnson has foreseen it.
He might be a Muslim but Javid is scandalously not above the perverse practice of racialising the issue of grooming. He has been in very steamy waters for tweeting about Asian paedophiles, the argument being that focusing on the ethnicity of the perpetrators does nothing to ascertain how and why the victims ended up vulnerable to these types of predators. It is also a type of prejudice which ignores the equally and maybe even more vast numbers of white British people who commit heinous sex crimes and other violent crimes in our society. The systematic abuse of children is not a race or religion issue and in any case, Islam is no more repulsive as a belief system than any other type of religion, all of which should be reserved purely for the hard of thinking. If there was a God, do you really fucking think he would have made this world? And put fucking me and you in it? Fuck off.
The irony appears completely lost on Javid that if the kind of immigration policies that his party wishes to introduce were in place when his family came over then he would not have been born in Rochdale and would not be in the privileged position in which he finds himself now. Like the politicians who benefitted from free higher education before voting en masse to introduce tuition fees Javid is a drawbridge-puller. Taking the passage offered to him and then doing his best to ensure that the opportunity is denied to countless others. Some might call him a Hunt.
The truth is actually that there isn’t a decent one among this group, described by several newspapers and wags on social media as the worst boy band ever assembled. No Direction. Even Stewart’s voting record is completely at odds with his on-screen nice-guy persona. He’s against the same welfare reforms and increases that Johnson, Hunt, Gove and Javid find so disagreeable and he is very much in their camp also on the issue of who gets to stay in the country post-apocalypse-Brexit. The single and only reason to hope that he comes out on top is that he isn’t one of the other four and, beyond that, appears to hold each of them in the same amount of contempt as most of the rest of us do. Throughout the hour he tried to distance himself from the others especially over Brexit and lowering taxes. Yet all that seemed to achieve was to make it easier for the others, self-appointed high-flyers of British politics, to gang up on him and make him look as out of touch as James from Oxford suspects he is. As a side note James from Oxford didn’t get much screen time but in the few minutes he had he came across as instantly unlikeable.
By the time you read this the list of candidates may have reduced by one or more. Even then we will be nowhere nearer to establishing ourselves as the ‘greatest country in the world’. Which is bad news for the growing number of imperialists who still lament the fact that we no longer rule countries several times bigger than our own.
“It’s not the greatest country in the world. That’s my answer…” Will says. Turning to a fellow panellist he adds;
“With a straight face, you’re gonna tell students that America is so star-spangled awesome that we’re the only ones in the world who have freedom? Canada has freedom. Japan has freedom. The UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, Belgium has freedom! There’s absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, number 4 in labor force and number 4 in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real and defense spending, where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies.”
“Now, none of this is the fault of a 20-year-old college student, but you, nonetheless, are, without a doubt, a member of the worst period generation period ever period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about! It sure used to be. We waged wars on poverty, not on poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were and we never beat our chest. We built great, big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases and we cultivated the world’s greatest artists AND the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, acted like men. We aspired to intelligence, we didn’t belittle it. It didn’t make us feel inferior.”
Will is talking about the United States of America here but he could easily have been responding to similarly bogus claims about Britain. The feeling that we have some kind of divine right to be world leaders prevails. Fifty-two percent of people voted to ‘take back control’ with Brexit in the 2016 EU referendum since when far right meatheads like Tommy Robinson have gained an alarming level of traction even if the other half of the population have held them up to the ridicule they deserve. The Tory leadership contest otherwise known as the race to become the next Prime Minister takes place against the backdrop of three years of this country tearing itself apart over the question of whether or not to leave the European Union. We are almost at the point of civil war and last night’s BBC TV debate between the leadership candidates, helpfully entitled ‘Our Next Prime Minister’ did the sum total of fuck all to allay my fears.
Will MacAvoy’s words are of course an entirely fictional dose of self-analysis. I cannot bring to mind any instance of any politician speaking with such disarming honesty about the state of his or her nation. Of the gruesome cast of this TV unspectacular only newcomer Rory Stewart appeared capable of anything but delusionary waffle. Emily Maitliss could not have been more out of her depth hosting if she had been presenting it under water, while hot-favourite Boris Johnson had clearly entered the whole thing determined to stick to his ill-conceived strategy of ignoring anything asked of him even or especially if it was a little bit awkward like….oh….I don’t know….do you accept that words have consequences after you compared Muslim women with letter-boxes? It needed a stronger personality than Maitliss to press this group of absolute frauds who have somehow managed to convince some that they are political heavyweights. Even when she pointed out that Johnson had compared the very sensitive Irish border situation to congestion charges in Islington he just chunnered on regardless, half-smirking the whole time as if appearing on the debate was just another public school jape. What time were we breaking for champers and a spot of rugger? Johnson could not have been playing the whole thing more for laughs if he had been filming another of his appearances on Have I Got News For You. If ever anyone should have stuck to comedy and left politics well alone it is this blathering buffoon. Prime Minister? Get directly to fuck and do not pass Go.
Coming into the debate Stewart was the only hope for anyone whose political leanings do not sit somewhere to the right of Steve Bannon. Yet having almost doubled his support in the latest ballot earlier in the day and so knocking Brexit-botching Dominic Raab out of the race the general consensus is that Stewart rather blew his opportunity. Displaying the kind of honesty not seen in a politician since Anne Widdecombe admitted she couldn’t dance Stewart spoke to BBC Newsnight’s Political Editor Nicholas Watt immediately after the debate and agreed that he had been ‘lacklustre’ and that he did not think the format worked for him. There was no live audience with questions posed by
The candidates apparently drew lots to determine the order of seating from left to right of the screen. For once finding himself on the far right (as we looked) of Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove and Sajid Javid Stewart looked uncomfortable throughout. He had the look of….well…..someone who had been forced to spend an hour trying to convince four self-important preeners that you can’t just ‘get on with Brexit’ and that there is something called Parliament. He was exasperated enough to remove his tie midway through the hour, while at one point the bizarre open-legged sitting position he had chosen was dispensed with so that he could put a hand to his face to express his dismay at wasting an otherwise perfectly good Tuesday evening. Five point seven million people watching on TV felt they had done exactly the same, no doubt.
If TV debates are any indication of which way the vote will go then the next Prime Minister is not going to be Stewart. So where does that leave us? Like Johnson, Hunt Gove and Javid all boasted that if they absolutely had to they would take Britain out of the EU without a deal. Even a question from a lady in Southampton about how a no deal Brexit could destroy her family’s livelihood did not deter them from their course. The trouble is they talk in terms of a little pain for long term gain when it comes to a no deal Brexit but they do so fully in the knowledge that they personally will not be affected one iota by any damage to the UK economy. These are the poster boys for the ‘I’m Alright Jack’ brand of politics that has prevailed since Thatcherism turned us all into total and utter twats.
That’s not just me, some lefty keyboard masher offering that opinion. Let’s take a look at their voting records shall we? Starting with Hunt, a man who as Health Secretary inspired the first strike by junior doctors in over 40 years. Terrifyingly, Hunt was Shadow Minister for the Disabled in 2005 when thankfully we did not have to suffer a Tory government. He once co-authored a book calling for the NHS to be replaced by a scheme which would involve paying into a personal health account with the proviso that those who could not afford it would have it funded by the state. All of which has the unpleasant whiff of a two-tier health system but anyway, what other villainy has this bug-eyed blert been up to?
In 2012 he said he was in favour of reducing the abortion limit from 24 weeks to 12 weeks, another bloke who will never have to give birth who nevertheless feels he has an opinion worth listening to on what women should do with their bodies. Worse than that was his 2013 plan to charge foreign nationals to use the NHS. The mind boggles at what his definition of a foreign national might be, but having claimed that they cost the NHS £200million it was later discovered that the figure was closer to £33million, £21million of which has been recouped. Maths experts will have worked out that this leaves £12million, which is less than Hunt’s planned revamp would have cost.
Hunt has consistently voted against increasing welfare benefits at least in line with the increase in prices, against increases in benefits for those unable to work through illness or disability (that’s not me I hasten to add so no personal agenda there), and has generally voted against tax increases for the rich and in particular the bankers (with a ‘b’) that caused the financial crisis of the late 2000s. Victoria Derbyshire’s recent Freudian slip was about more than just the sound of this man’s name.
Then there is Gove, Education Secretary from 2010 to 2014 and currently the man responsible for ‘Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’. Like Stewart, Gove is a former Labour man who has had that moment of clarity that successful people enjoy when they realise that they can only become incredibly rich by supporting Labour politics. To become absurdly, pointlessly rich you have to rely on the Conservatives and their disaster capitalism.
Gove described himself in 2012 as ‘consitutionally incapable’ of leading the Conservative Party and yet here we are just seven short years later glued to our sets as he outlines exactly how totally different he is not from his supposed rival Johnson and the mirky, snake-like Hunt. Both think they can get Brexit ‘done’ as they would have it by the sheer force of their will. As Stewart put it earlier in the debate they are sitting in a room which contains one door to Brexit. The door runs through Parliament but instead of going through that door Gove and his ilk are sitting in the room shouting ‘Believe in Britain’. Exactly the kind of arrogant and baseless imperialism that Will MacAvoy was talking about in the opening scene of ‘The Newsroom’.
Talking of newsrooms another thing that Gove has in common with Johnson is that he has a background in journalism. He has transformed, Anakin Skywalker-like from the sort of person who goes out on strike with the trade unions in the 1990s to the sort who later describes evil overlord Rupert Murdoch as “one of the most impressive and significant figures of the last 50 years.” Gove is quite evidently someone whose opinion on any given subject depends entirely on what will be of most benefit to Michael Gove at the time. After this unedifying TV spectacle he laughably told Watt that he had won the debate, to which Watt retorted ‘how scientific is that? I have to admit at this point that I laughed out loud. Almost snorted. The kind of laugh I haven’t let out since 63 Up’s Paul fell flat on his face as a 7-year-old in 1964. Gove’s outlandish claim is about as scientific as Believe In Britain, I’d say.
There are some things that Gove is certain of and on which he will not be easily moved. Like Hunt, Gove has consistently voted against allowing European nationals to remain in the UK even if they had already been living here before the referendum. He has Hunt-esque views on what to do with welfare benefits and how much of them to distribute to the sick and disabled, and like Hunt he is rather fond of the idea of reducing social benefit to housing tenants deemed to have more bedrooms than they need. The bedroom tax is what Labour calls this policy. Gove wants that, but he doesn’t want an annual tax on expensive homes otherwise known as the mansion tax. The most worrying thing about Gove considering that he is the current man in charge of the government’s environmental policy is that he has often voted against the introduction of measures to prevent further climate change. He’s also not the man to vote for if you are a badger, as he has voted to have your lot culled on a couple of occasions.
Luckily for him, like the vast majority of us badgers have no say on who will become the next Tory leader. There have been many people who, quite understandably, have ignored the two television debates that have so far taken place because in the end the result will be decided not by the general public at large but by around 100,000-150,000 Conservative Party members. Aged, upstanding-member-of-the-community types who wear sensible sweaters and tank tops, go crown green bowling but never if their wives aren’t with them and think post-war rationing was the ‘good old days’. I can understand the view that none of this matters and so why don’t the television companies just leave them to sort out their own squabble and come back to us when they have come up with a new Prime Minister. I must admit that was my initial thought when I saw that the major television broadcasters would each be hosting their own debates between the ever-shrinking list of candidates (five will become four at the most later on today and, depending on how it goes, possibly even fewer). But on the other hand I don’t think it will do the rest of us, the people who wouldn’t vote Tory if our lives depended on it, any harm to keep an eye out and learn more about the men who aspire to take over from the absolute shit show that has been Theresa May.
I don’t know why but somehow the phrase shit show has just reminded me of our final contender, the boy Javid. Sajid Javid is currently the Home Secretary but he is an outsider for the top job. He received the lowest number of votes possible to survive (33) in Tuesday’s ballot and many think that as a result of that and his performance in the TV debate that he will quietly fall away and throw his weight behind Johnson’s campaign. Similar noises are being made about Stewart who has admitted to holding talks with Gove about some sort of alliance, although such a move looks unlikely given that Stewart still insists that he would only enter into an agreement on condition that it was he and not Gove leading the challenge to Johnson. For now all of that is speculation and conjecture so we have to assume that Javid will continue in the race. So what do we know about him?
Some would describe him as a class traitor. He was born in Rochdale in 1969, the son of a bus driver. His family moved to Bristol and lived in a flat above a shop, even though he was one of five brothers. He’s certainly a man who knows what it is like to go without, if he can remember that far back. And in any case, can there be such a thing as a class traitor when the whole idea of social mobility is to make it possible for someone to move between the different classes? Nobody is advocating that people should refrain from self-improvement. It is the gluttony and the who-gives-a-shit attitude to those left behind which sticks in what used to be termed the craw.
Javid’s election as Tory leader would be quite a social breakthrough. He would be the first Muslim to hold the position and of course the first to be Prime Minister. This might very well make the Tommy Robinson fans on Twitter illuminate with rage and could well lead to all kinds of milkshake-related rioting on the streets of Thanet South and Warrington. It might be worth grinning and bearing a couple of years of Tory rule until another General Election just for that. Tellingly all five candidates were adamant that there would be no General Election in the immediate aftermath of the Conservative leadership vote. Even Johnson, who Maitliss pointed out had demanded that Gordon Brown face the public vote when he took over the Premiership from Tony Blair in 2007, managed to cobble together some lame explanation about how circumstances are different this time because Brown was not taking over in the midst of a crisis like Brexit. Yes Boris, a crisis which you and your crony Gove went most of the way towards creating. Is anyone seeing an evil plot forming? It all seems to be transpiring exactly how Emperor Johnson has foreseen it.
He might be a Muslim but Javid is scandalously not above the perverse practice of racialising the issue of grooming. He has been in very steamy waters for tweeting about Asian paedophiles, the argument being that focusing on the ethnicity of the perpetrators does nothing to ascertain how and why the victims ended up vulnerable to these types of predators. It is also a type of prejudice which ignores the equally and maybe even more vast numbers of white British people who commit heinous sex crimes and other violent crimes in our society. The systematic abuse of children is not a race or religion issue and in any case, Islam is no more repulsive as a belief system than any other type of religion, all of which should be reserved purely for the hard of thinking. If there was a God, do you really fucking think he would have made this world? And put fucking me and you in it? Fuck off.
The irony appears completely lost on Javid that if the kind of immigration policies that his party wishes to introduce were in place when his family came over then he would not have been born in Rochdale and would not be in the privileged position in which he finds himself now. Like the politicians who benefitted from free higher education before voting en masse to introduce tuition fees Javid is a drawbridge-puller. Taking the passage offered to him and then doing his best to ensure that the opportunity is denied to countless others. Some might call him a Hunt.
The truth is actually that there isn’t a decent one among this group, described by several newspapers and wags on social media as the worst boy band ever assembled. No Direction. Even Stewart’s voting record is completely at odds with his on-screen nice-guy persona. He’s against the same welfare reforms and increases that Johnson, Hunt, Gove and Javid find so disagreeable and he is very much in their camp also on the issue of who gets to stay in the country post-apocalypse-Brexit. The single and only reason to hope that he comes out on top is that he isn’t one of the other four and, beyond that, appears to hold each of them in the same amount of contempt as most of the rest of us do. Throughout the hour he tried to distance himself from the others especially over Brexit and lowering taxes. Yet all that seemed to achieve was to make it easier for the others, self-appointed high-flyers of British politics, to gang up on him and make him look as out of touch as James from Oxford suspects he is. As a side note James from Oxford didn’t get much screen time but in the few minutes he had he came across as instantly unlikeable.
By the time you read this the list of candidates may have reduced by one or more. Even then we will be nowhere nearer to establishing ourselves as the ‘greatest country in the world’. Which is bad news for the growing number of imperialists who still lament the fact that we no longer rule countries several times bigger than our own.
Tuesday, 11 June 2019
I Don’t Do Wheelchairs
I’m going on holiday in a couple of weeks. Thought you might like to know that. After all Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard is meant to be at least partly a travel blog. We’re going back to Rhodes having been there in 2015. We don’t usually go back to a place we have been before, at least not one we have been to relatively recently. But with everything that’s been going on with my health over the last 18 months we wanted to take a bit of the stress out of it by choosing somewhere we know we have enjoyed before and will again.
Stress. I know. First world problems. Let’s downgrade that to anxiety. As much as going on holiday will always be a better experience than staying here and going to work every day, there’s still a little anxiety attached to going somewhere new. Will you like it? Will the weather be ok? The hotel? What is there to do there?
Most people don’t have to worry too much about whether they will be allowed on the plane. Short of a volcanic ash cloud, a major terrorist incident or a major Jagerbomb incident you’re getting on that plane. All you have to do is turn up on time, reasonably sober, don’t be a terrorist and you’re aboard.
A large percentage of my experience has been similar. Just turn up. I’ve had the odd mishap as longtime followers of MOAFH will know. It’s difficult when airport staff don’t feel able to talk to me and instead find themselves asking ‘what’s the wheelchair’s name?’. It’s worse still when the toilet on your American Airlines flight to New York (7 hours) is too narrow to accommodate the aisle chair that only exists for the purpose of moving people who cannot walk to where they need to be on a plane. If the inability to walk negated the need to urinate that would be a deal I might strike but sadly that is not how disability works. American Airlines aisle chairs are not fit for purpose. Like Esther McVey. They had to literally rip the toilet door off to allow my bladder any relief.
For all these problems I’ve never yet failed to get on board a plane altogether because of my disability. There’s always someone there to assist, even if at some airports in non-English speaking countries alert you to their presence by grunting at me and in some cases manhandling me. And while we’re about it, I am sad to have to point out that people are still putting their hands on me in the street here at home too. They see me pushing up a hill or getting out of my car and they offer their help. Now this is a kind gesture, but when it is politely declined (as it always is initially) it is not then cool to rush over and put your hands on me or my chair and begin propelling me to where you think I want to go at a pace you deem appropriate. What is wrong with people? If I started putting my hands on people who have politely declined my help I’d be risking a sexual assault charge.
If none of that convinces you then consider this next time you feel tempted to accost me over Saints Bridge. How likely is it that I only go out on my own on the off chance that you will help me? Some disabled people do need help, admittedly. And since education on disability is only a slight notch above education on Brexit in this country it is just about conceivable that you might not be able to tell the difference. People who refer to me as a ‘wheelchair’ don’t do so by accident. They do it because a wheelchair is genuinely all they see. I correct them every time. Some are rightly shamed by their ignorance and apologise. They’re the good ones. Others just shoot you a baffled look as if they genuinely don’t see a problem. In their world there are men, women, boys, girls and wheelchairs. And walkers, so it transpires.
Taxi drivers are the worst for it.
“I don’t do wheelchairs...” they protest.
“Bad back.”
The irony of using their own perceived disability to discriminate against the disabled is lost on them.
Where was I? I’ve gone off beam. Aeroplanes. I’ve never been refused permission and assistance to board an aeroplane, a fate that befell Matt Byrne from Nottingham last week. I know Matt a little from my time involved in wheelchair basketball but just to put you at ease I don’t know him so well as to have any bias towards him. I’m not fighting his corner because we’re acquainted. I’m fighting his corner because he’s been horribly treated in this instance. He was at Dublin Airport trying to board a flight back to Nottingham. As he waited for the assistance he needs to get on board he was informed that the pilot had taken the decision not to allow him on board because the plane was late. The plane was late. Matt wasn’t late. Nor was he drunk, aggressive or rude and nor is he a fucking shoe bomber. The plane left without him all the same and he had to catch another flight some hours later. And all this after he had been directed by airport staff to wait until all the other passengers were on board before getting his chance.
Not that any disabled person deserves this sort of treatment but it is noteworthy to add that Matt is a Paralympian, winner of two bronze medals with the Great Britain wheelchair basketball team. Where he not disabled he would be treated like a celebrity. Instead he is fobbed off by Ryanair - yes I’m naming you, don’t think I won’t - in the most shabby and unacceptable fashion.
Since the incident Ryanair have spent much of their time passing the blame on to OCS, the company responsible for providing assistance to passengers with mobility issues via lifts and undersized aisle chairs and so forth. In fact they seemed slightly affronted that the money they paid OCS did not secure the completion of the job. Yet it was their pilot, aviation’s answer to the St Helens taxi driver who ‘doesn’t do wheelchairs’ and who pulled the plug on Matt’s travel plans.
It’s not bloody good enough.
Stress. I know. First world problems. Let’s downgrade that to anxiety. As much as going on holiday will always be a better experience than staying here and going to work every day, there’s still a little anxiety attached to going somewhere new. Will you like it? Will the weather be ok? The hotel? What is there to do there?
Most people don’t have to worry too much about whether they will be allowed on the plane. Short of a volcanic ash cloud, a major terrorist incident or a major Jagerbomb incident you’re getting on that plane. All you have to do is turn up on time, reasonably sober, don’t be a terrorist and you’re aboard.
A large percentage of my experience has been similar. Just turn up. I’ve had the odd mishap as longtime followers of MOAFH will know. It’s difficult when airport staff don’t feel able to talk to me and instead find themselves asking ‘what’s the wheelchair’s name?’. It’s worse still when the toilet on your American Airlines flight to New York (7 hours) is too narrow to accommodate the aisle chair that only exists for the purpose of moving people who cannot walk to where they need to be on a plane. If the inability to walk negated the need to urinate that would be a deal I might strike but sadly that is not how disability works. American Airlines aisle chairs are not fit for purpose. Like Esther McVey. They had to literally rip the toilet door off to allow my bladder any relief.
For all these problems I’ve never yet failed to get on board a plane altogether because of my disability. There’s always someone there to assist, even if at some airports in non-English speaking countries alert you to their presence by grunting at me and in some cases manhandling me. And while we’re about it, I am sad to have to point out that people are still putting their hands on me in the street here at home too. They see me pushing up a hill or getting out of my car and they offer their help. Now this is a kind gesture, but when it is politely declined (as it always is initially) it is not then cool to rush over and put your hands on me or my chair and begin propelling me to where you think I want to go at a pace you deem appropriate. What is wrong with people? If I started putting my hands on people who have politely declined my help I’d be risking a sexual assault charge.
If none of that convinces you then consider this next time you feel tempted to accost me over Saints Bridge. How likely is it that I only go out on my own on the off chance that you will help me? Some disabled people do need help, admittedly. And since education on disability is only a slight notch above education on Brexit in this country it is just about conceivable that you might not be able to tell the difference. People who refer to me as a ‘wheelchair’ don’t do so by accident. They do it because a wheelchair is genuinely all they see. I correct them every time. Some are rightly shamed by their ignorance and apologise. They’re the good ones. Others just shoot you a baffled look as if they genuinely don’t see a problem. In their world there are men, women, boys, girls and wheelchairs. And walkers, so it transpires.
Taxi drivers are the worst for it.
“I don’t do wheelchairs...” they protest.
“Bad back.”
The irony of using their own perceived disability to discriminate against the disabled is lost on them.
Where was I? I’ve gone off beam. Aeroplanes. I’ve never been refused permission and assistance to board an aeroplane, a fate that befell Matt Byrne from Nottingham last week. I know Matt a little from my time involved in wheelchair basketball but just to put you at ease I don’t know him so well as to have any bias towards him. I’m not fighting his corner because we’re acquainted. I’m fighting his corner because he’s been horribly treated in this instance. He was at Dublin Airport trying to board a flight back to Nottingham. As he waited for the assistance he needs to get on board he was informed that the pilot had taken the decision not to allow him on board because the plane was late. The plane was late. Matt wasn’t late. Nor was he drunk, aggressive or rude and nor is he a fucking shoe bomber. The plane left without him all the same and he had to catch another flight some hours later. And all this after he had been directed by airport staff to wait until all the other passengers were on board before getting his chance.
Not that any disabled person deserves this sort of treatment but it is noteworthy to add that Matt is a Paralympian, winner of two bronze medals with the Great Britain wheelchair basketball team. Where he not disabled he would be treated like a celebrity. Instead he is fobbed off by Ryanair - yes I’m naming you, don’t think I won’t - in the most shabby and unacceptable fashion.
Since the incident Ryanair have spent much of their time passing the blame on to OCS, the company responsible for providing assistance to passengers with mobility issues via lifts and undersized aisle chairs and so forth. In fact they seemed slightly affronted that the money they paid OCS did not secure the completion of the job. Yet it was their pilot, aviation’s answer to the St Helens taxi driver who ‘doesn’t do wheelchairs’ and who pulled the plug on Matt’s travel plans.
It’s not bloody good enough.
Wednesday, 5 June 2019
63 Up
Time to dust off the keyboard. Well, what I mean is it is time to dust off the non-rugby league writing keyboard. I might not have cobbled anything together for this column in a while but I write about rugby league at least twice a week. They even let me speak about it on the radio too, which is bad news for fans of Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook, expansionism and Eddie Hearn.
Today I want to talk to you about something off the telly. More and more we are developing into a society which, when it is not looking at its phone and entering into political debate with strangers on Twitter, is sat on its sofa watching one of the now gazillions of TV programmes that are at our disposal either live or on a multitude of catch-up platforms. Telly is a subject on which we all seem to have an opinion. Specifically I want to talk to you about 63 Up which is on ITV this week, starting its run on Tuesday (June 4) and broadcasting on consecutive nights up to and including Thursday (June 6).
ITV is normally full of rot. Piers Morgan make my eyes bleed and my ears swell. On the very same night that they launched the new run of 63 Up ITV threw another series of the irksome Love Island at us over on one of its sister stations. No doubt the viewing figures will show that our idiot nation was far more engaged with that than with 63 Up. Yet 63 Up is different from the normal, run of the mill reality shows that now dominate the schedules. This is genuinely compelling, ground-breaking telly that stays with you. The others are heavily edited and feature people just desperate to be on TV for whom Charlie Brooker’s memorable phrase ‘look at me turdhole’ was surely coined.
For those of you not familiar with the concept 63 Up is the latest instalment in a documentary film which was first made in 1964 charting the lives of 14 children through new episodes every seven years. The central idea behind it was to explore the old quote attributed to Aristotle that goes something like ‘give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man’. The notion that you can still see aspects of the children we were no matter how old we get and what life throws at us.
The first episode took up the story of four of our subjects. Firstly there was Tony, first seen in 1964 as a seven-year old falling flat on his face in one hilarious yet also slightly sad clip. You shouldn’t laugh at a child falling over and it does make you feel sorry for him but it is also undeniably funny. At that point he talks about his ambition to become a jockey, an ambition he fulfilled to an extent riding in the same race as legendary tax dodger Lester Piggott at Kempton Park. Yet Tony’s career in the sport never really took off and he ended up in Spain after various stints as a London cab driver. He also does some work as an extra, and will be appearing in an upcoming film about football called ’90 minutes’. I did wonder whether his involvement in the Up series over the last 56 years had anything to do with giving him a leg up in this regard, but I let the thought pass.
There’s an honesty about Tony that you can’t dislike. Previous episodes chronicled the trouble he got into with his marriage thanks to his own misdemeanours with other women, but he and his wife have come through all that and are still together today, living in a semi-retirement village for the over 50s in Essex. They have brought up their granddaughter as their own because of the personal problems experienced by their own daughter, though all of their other children have managed to find their own way in life and seem happy and healthy.
The one Tony moment that makes you want to put your fist through the TV is when director Michael Apted asks Tony’s opinion on Brexit. Seems a pertinent question to put to a man who has had to return from living in Spain for economic reasons, and in any case it is probably the most burning topic that has emerged since the show was last aired as 56 Up in 2012. Tony voted to leave the European Union, but regrets it because he doesn’t feel that leaving is now feasible. That seems a fairly sensible conclusion at which to arrive. Leaving might not have seemed like such a bad idea until it became clear that it would cause such economic uncertainty and that there would be no way of implementing it without risking the peace achieved in Northern Ireland.
The problem I have with Tony’s politics is that as we go back to old episodes of the Up series we repeatedly see him complain about how people from his working class background – he’s from the east end of London – don’t have the same opportunities as those born into wealth. Yet despite this he proudly states that he has always voted Tory. Only their failure to deliver Brexit has persuaded him not to vote Conservative. So on the one hand he is angered by the plight of the working class in a system set up so that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, yet on the other hand he votes Tory and has done all of his life. You just can’t help some people.
Andrew comes from a slightly more affluent background than Tony, and of all the four that we see in this first episode appears to me to be the one to have been through the least change since we first saw him as a 7-year-old singing Waltzing Matilda in Latin with his school friends. His family life is stable with his children all leading quiet, hard working lives just as he has. He is a lawyer and seems to understand and appreciate what his background, education and chosen occupation have given him. There’s even still a physical resemblance to 7-year-old Andrew, still thin, gawky looking but with significantly less hair and significantly more visible forehead.
When we meet up again with Sue there’s a rather bracing moment from when she was 14 and is asked about marriage. It’s bracing because it seems to infer that the most important question anyone can think of to ask a 14-year-old girl is whether or not she wants to be someone’s wife. This strikes me as a fairly old fashioned attitude towards women but let’s remember that Sue was 14 in 1970. Gender equality is not quite a done deal, not quite over the line in 2019. It was a million miles away in 1970 so it probably seemed like an obvious thing to talk to a young girl about. You would hope that if they began the series now and were interviewing 14-year-old girls about their aspirations they would not be confined to the companionship of some moody, male dependent.
Sue wasn’t big on marriage in 1970 but this did not prevent her from being divorced by the time she was 35. To be fair she has learned her lesson. She is currently engaged to a man called Glen and has been for the last 20 years. Neither are in any rush to get hitched. I can get on board with this approach. I have been with Emma for 20 years also, and neither of us have any interest in getting married. My view is that it is an outdated institution that has its roots not only in religion which I detest but also in ownership and control. It wasn’t until as recently as 1991 that a man was finally prosecuted for the crime of raping his wife. Until then the legal reality was that he was perfectly entitled to do so on the grounds that she had given her consent at all times upon committing to the marriage. If we are as civilised as we should be as a society then I would like to think that in a hundred or so years from now people will look back on the idea of marriage with wild-eyed wonder and befuddlement.
The final subject this week was Nick, a product of the Yorkshire Dales who became a nuclear physicist and now lives in the shit show that is Trump’s America. He’s a big fan of America but thankfully not of right wing, orange-raced sex offender Trump. There always seemed to be a sadness around Nick which comes across sharply when he describes the birth of his son as the one moment of pure, unadulterated joy in his life. Sadder still is the fact that Nick is now battling against throat cancer. Ever the teacher, Nick takes us through his treatments and the possible ramifications of them. It always seemed unlikely that all 14 of the children filmed back in 1964 would make it this far without any of them ever having to go through these kinds of horrors. Statistically they are all but inevitable. Yet as Nick explains his current philosophy on life which is to view things very much in the short term it’s still a shocking moment. An ‘oh-no’ moment that jars. That’s the beauty of the Up series versus the reality TV bile that it is accused of being a precursor to. You see the characters often enough and at various stages of their life to become really invested in what happens to them, but not so much that you want to take a swipe at their head with a spade. The latter is the effect of a summer spent watching 12 twats in a house or some such showing off in the relatively shorter time frame of one summer. Most reality TV shows are manufactured, fake and most of all total and utter overkill.
I can relate to Nick’s current view on the world. I don’t have cancer and never have, but I do have kidneys with all the usefulness of Dominic Raab. When you face the prospect of a transplant and possibly dialysis before that you do start to live your life in shorter chunks. You don’t plan too far ahead. At my last appointment with the renal psychologist we chatted for a good while about how nice it is that currently I can stop worrying about anything kidney-related until the end of July thanks to a slight upturn in function. Two stress-free months isn’t a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. That wouldn’t have seemed all that comforting to me at one time, in fact it would probably have frightened me more than Anne Widdecombe does.
The difference of course is that I have every reason to believe that my transplant will be successful and that after that I will be able to live as full a life as I would had I never experienced any kidney disease. For Nick things are less certain it seems. Cancer survival rates have improved vastly over the course of his lifetime so perhaps he will be lucky, but there are no guarantees against such an awful, evil disease that still claims far too many lives.
Though I still have two more episodes to enjoy I hope Nick and the others, including the 78-year-old Apted who must be nearing retirement after a great career in film and television, is around for 70 Up in 2026.
Today I want to talk to you about something off the telly. More and more we are developing into a society which, when it is not looking at its phone and entering into political debate with strangers on Twitter, is sat on its sofa watching one of the now gazillions of TV programmes that are at our disposal either live or on a multitude of catch-up platforms. Telly is a subject on which we all seem to have an opinion. Specifically I want to talk to you about 63 Up which is on ITV this week, starting its run on Tuesday (June 4) and broadcasting on consecutive nights up to and including Thursday (June 6).
ITV is normally full of rot. Piers Morgan make my eyes bleed and my ears swell. On the very same night that they launched the new run of 63 Up ITV threw another series of the irksome Love Island at us over on one of its sister stations. No doubt the viewing figures will show that our idiot nation was far more engaged with that than with 63 Up. Yet 63 Up is different from the normal, run of the mill reality shows that now dominate the schedules. This is genuinely compelling, ground-breaking telly that stays with you. The others are heavily edited and feature people just desperate to be on TV for whom Charlie Brooker’s memorable phrase ‘look at me turdhole’ was surely coined.
For those of you not familiar with the concept 63 Up is the latest instalment in a documentary film which was first made in 1964 charting the lives of 14 children through new episodes every seven years. The central idea behind it was to explore the old quote attributed to Aristotle that goes something like ‘give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man’. The notion that you can still see aspects of the children we were no matter how old we get and what life throws at us.
The first episode took up the story of four of our subjects. Firstly there was Tony, first seen in 1964 as a seven-year old falling flat on his face in one hilarious yet also slightly sad clip. You shouldn’t laugh at a child falling over and it does make you feel sorry for him but it is also undeniably funny. At that point he talks about his ambition to become a jockey, an ambition he fulfilled to an extent riding in the same race as legendary tax dodger Lester Piggott at Kempton Park. Yet Tony’s career in the sport never really took off and he ended up in Spain after various stints as a London cab driver. He also does some work as an extra, and will be appearing in an upcoming film about football called ’90 minutes’. I did wonder whether his involvement in the Up series over the last 56 years had anything to do with giving him a leg up in this regard, but I let the thought pass.
There’s an honesty about Tony that you can’t dislike. Previous episodes chronicled the trouble he got into with his marriage thanks to his own misdemeanours with other women, but he and his wife have come through all that and are still together today, living in a semi-retirement village for the over 50s in Essex. They have brought up their granddaughter as their own because of the personal problems experienced by their own daughter, though all of their other children have managed to find their own way in life and seem happy and healthy.
The one Tony moment that makes you want to put your fist through the TV is when director Michael Apted asks Tony’s opinion on Brexit. Seems a pertinent question to put to a man who has had to return from living in Spain for economic reasons, and in any case it is probably the most burning topic that has emerged since the show was last aired as 56 Up in 2012. Tony voted to leave the European Union, but regrets it because he doesn’t feel that leaving is now feasible. That seems a fairly sensible conclusion at which to arrive. Leaving might not have seemed like such a bad idea until it became clear that it would cause such economic uncertainty and that there would be no way of implementing it without risking the peace achieved in Northern Ireland.
The problem I have with Tony’s politics is that as we go back to old episodes of the Up series we repeatedly see him complain about how people from his working class background – he’s from the east end of London – don’t have the same opportunities as those born into wealth. Yet despite this he proudly states that he has always voted Tory. Only their failure to deliver Brexit has persuaded him not to vote Conservative. So on the one hand he is angered by the plight of the working class in a system set up so that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, yet on the other hand he votes Tory and has done all of his life. You just can’t help some people.
Andrew comes from a slightly more affluent background than Tony, and of all the four that we see in this first episode appears to me to be the one to have been through the least change since we first saw him as a 7-year-old singing Waltzing Matilda in Latin with his school friends. His family life is stable with his children all leading quiet, hard working lives just as he has. He is a lawyer and seems to understand and appreciate what his background, education and chosen occupation have given him. There’s even still a physical resemblance to 7-year-old Andrew, still thin, gawky looking but with significantly less hair and significantly more visible forehead.
When we meet up again with Sue there’s a rather bracing moment from when she was 14 and is asked about marriage. It’s bracing because it seems to infer that the most important question anyone can think of to ask a 14-year-old girl is whether or not she wants to be someone’s wife. This strikes me as a fairly old fashioned attitude towards women but let’s remember that Sue was 14 in 1970. Gender equality is not quite a done deal, not quite over the line in 2019. It was a million miles away in 1970 so it probably seemed like an obvious thing to talk to a young girl about. You would hope that if they began the series now and were interviewing 14-year-old girls about their aspirations they would not be confined to the companionship of some moody, male dependent.
Sue wasn’t big on marriage in 1970 but this did not prevent her from being divorced by the time she was 35. To be fair she has learned her lesson. She is currently engaged to a man called Glen and has been for the last 20 years. Neither are in any rush to get hitched. I can get on board with this approach. I have been with Emma for 20 years also, and neither of us have any interest in getting married. My view is that it is an outdated institution that has its roots not only in religion which I detest but also in ownership and control. It wasn’t until as recently as 1991 that a man was finally prosecuted for the crime of raping his wife. Until then the legal reality was that he was perfectly entitled to do so on the grounds that she had given her consent at all times upon committing to the marriage. If we are as civilised as we should be as a society then I would like to think that in a hundred or so years from now people will look back on the idea of marriage with wild-eyed wonder and befuddlement.
The final subject this week was Nick, a product of the Yorkshire Dales who became a nuclear physicist and now lives in the shit show that is Trump’s America. He’s a big fan of America but thankfully not of right wing, orange-raced sex offender Trump. There always seemed to be a sadness around Nick which comes across sharply when he describes the birth of his son as the one moment of pure, unadulterated joy in his life. Sadder still is the fact that Nick is now battling against throat cancer. Ever the teacher, Nick takes us through his treatments and the possible ramifications of them. It always seemed unlikely that all 14 of the children filmed back in 1964 would make it this far without any of them ever having to go through these kinds of horrors. Statistically they are all but inevitable. Yet as Nick explains his current philosophy on life which is to view things very much in the short term it’s still a shocking moment. An ‘oh-no’ moment that jars. That’s the beauty of the Up series versus the reality TV bile that it is accused of being a precursor to. You see the characters often enough and at various stages of their life to become really invested in what happens to them, but not so much that you want to take a swipe at their head with a spade. The latter is the effect of a summer spent watching 12 twats in a house or some such showing off in the relatively shorter time frame of one summer. Most reality TV shows are manufactured, fake and most of all total and utter overkill.
I can relate to Nick’s current view on the world. I don’t have cancer and never have, but I do have kidneys with all the usefulness of Dominic Raab. When you face the prospect of a transplant and possibly dialysis before that you do start to live your life in shorter chunks. You don’t plan too far ahead. At my last appointment with the renal psychologist we chatted for a good while about how nice it is that currently I can stop worrying about anything kidney-related until the end of July thanks to a slight upturn in function. Two stress-free months isn’t a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. That wouldn’t have seemed all that comforting to me at one time, in fact it would probably have frightened me more than Anne Widdecombe does.
The difference of course is that I have every reason to believe that my transplant will be successful and that after that I will be able to live as full a life as I would had I never experienced any kidney disease. For Nick things are less certain it seems. Cancer survival rates have improved vastly over the course of his lifetime so perhaps he will be lucky, but there are no guarantees against such an awful, evil disease that still claims far too many lives.
Though I still have two more episodes to enjoy I hope Nick and the others, including the 78-year-old Apted who must be nearing retirement after a great career in film and television, is around for 70 Up in 2026.
Wednesday, 27 March 2019
Brexit - Won’t Somebody Think Of The Tories...?
Oh how brave and noble Theresa May is. After several decades of wrangling about the Tory-led shit show that is Brexit the Prime Minister came up with one last desperate ruse to get her half-arsedly negotiated deal through Parliament. She promised to leave office early.
As sacrifices go this was right up there with anything Jack Bauer came up with in seven seasons (or was it eight?) of 24. Anyone remember when he offered to fly the plane carrying the deadly weapon of mass destruction into the desert? Surely that was the end of Jack? But oh no because fortunately the terminally ill George Mason has sneaked on board the plane and offered to complete the mission. From there it was a no-brainer. Jack lived to fight another day of high-octane ant-terroring.
As I write May has also survived her own offer to fall upon her metaphorical sword. That’s because the Speaker of the House John Bercow remains adamant that May’s twice defeated deal would not return for a third outing without significant change. And quite right too. You’re not fooling anyone with a trilogy in which parts two and three are exactly the same as part one. Even fans of superhero movies wouldn’t tolerate that level of audience insult.
Undeterred the major players in the race to succeed May if and when she does leave Downing Street rubbed their hands with movie villain glee at news of a possible Tory leadership contest. The 16th century’s Jacob Rees-Mogg, a man brilliantly described on Twitter earlier as a ‘haunted dildo’ threw his top hat into the ring straight away, pledging to back May’s deal ‘to save Brexit’, while just 24 hours on from declaring that May’s deal would leave us ‘screwed’ top screwer and all around buffoon Boris Johnson did likewise. A third player, Michael Gove, has not commented at the time of writing but no doubt he’s just waiting for his wife Sarah Vine to tell him which way to vote. There’s no accounting for tastes and love is blind but Vine must be a quite preposterous individual if we’re judging her on the basis that she chooses to wake up next to Gove every morning. Most people would rather be woken by the smell of their own body waste.
Eventually, one of these three absolute whoppers looks certain to replace May. Her entire three-year tenure has been dominated by trips to Brussels to try to negotiate a Brexit she campaigned against in the run up to David Cameron’s ill-advised referendum. She hasn’t been able to do it, not only because she’s an incompetent bell-end but also because it was a bloody difficult task. Even for a bloody difficult woman. In the immediate aftermath of the referendum Cameron had done a Reggie Perrin as it became quite clear that even the finest political and economic minds couldn’t predict the consequences of leaving the EU. What chance did Dave from Harrogate have of making an informed decision. All the referendum did was give Dave from Harrogate a voice with which to rail against foreigners because, after all, couldn’t everyone else see that if we continued with our EU membership we’d all be living under Sharia Law by a week next Tuesday?
Before the official ousting of May and a Tory leadership election can get under way there are still some annoying hurdles for the leading Tory boys to negotiate. Negotiate? Perhaps that’s the wrong choice of word. Anyway, no fewer than eight Brexit related solutions were voted on by MPs tonight, none of which were able to secure a majority, All of which means that we are likely to see May occupying number 10 for some time to come, much to the disgust of the circling vultures. That the Tory Party are trying to use the biggest political issue in the UK for a generation to sort out their own domestic squabbling is one of the most shameful scenarios in British history. There we were spending three years worrying about what the effects of Brexit might be and it turns out that the real issue was about which right wing narcissist will get to take over when the mess is finally cleaned up.
A Tory leadership election seems such a humdrum way to sort that dispute in any case. Why not reflect the times by having them compete in a televised baking contest instead. Something like the Great Celebri-Tory Snake Off. Prue Leith could announce the results 12 hours early just to give it that authentic Bake Off feel. And all the proceeds would of course go to good old Tory causes like The Already Massively Wealthy.
Failing that, and if I could choose my own method of who should replace May, it would be something more like The Hunger Games. A fight to the death within the grounds of the Palace of Westminster with the last man standing sent to Panem to face President Donald Sutherland to negotiate a trade deal. All the while not knowing whether fellow Tribute Peeta would be a help, a hindrance or else just tear off the new PM’s head in a fit of inexplicable rage.
So as we reach the end of March those wags in the gutter press that have helped whip up this Dog’s Brexit are already telling us it’s the end of May. Unless that happens by way of a General Election and the public get the chance to oust this medieval austerity-loving government, sat on the top of their cash pile telling poor people that their greed is crashing the economy, I’m not all that excited about it.
As sacrifices go this was right up there with anything Jack Bauer came up with in seven seasons (or was it eight?) of 24. Anyone remember when he offered to fly the plane carrying the deadly weapon of mass destruction into the desert? Surely that was the end of Jack? But oh no because fortunately the terminally ill George Mason has sneaked on board the plane and offered to complete the mission. From there it was a no-brainer. Jack lived to fight another day of high-octane ant-terroring.
As I write May has also survived her own offer to fall upon her metaphorical sword. That’s because the Speaker of the House John Bercow remains adamant that May’s twice defeated deal would not return for a third outing without significant change. And quite right too. You’re not fooling anyone with a trilogy in which parts two and three are exactly the same as part one. Even fans of superhero movies wouldn’t tolerate that level of audience insult.
Undeterred the major players in the race to succeed May if and when she does leave Downing Street rubbed their hands with movie villain glee at news of a possible Tory leadership contest. The 16th century’s Jacob Rees-Mogg, a man brilliantly described on Twitter earlier as a ‘haunted dildo’ threw his top hat into the ring straight away, pledging to back May’s deal ‘to save Brexit’, while just 24 hours on from declaring that May’s deal would leave us ‘screwed’ top screwer and all around buffoon Boris Johnson did likewise. A third player, Michael Gove, has not commented at the time of writing but no doubt he’s just waiting for his wife Sarah Vine to tell him which way to vote. There’s no accounting for tastes and love is blind but Vine must be a quite preposterous individual if we’re judging her on the basis that she chooses to wake up next to Gove every morning. Most people would rather be woken by the smell of their own body waste.
Eventually, one of these three absolute whoppers looks certain to replace May. Her entire three-year tenure has been dominated by trips to Brussels to try to negotiate a Brexit she campaigned against in the run up to David Cameron’s ill-advised referendum. She hasn’t been able to do it, not only because she’s an incompetent bell-end but also because it was a bloody difficult task. Even for a bloody difficult woman. In the immediate aftermath of the referendum Cameron had done a Reggie Perrin as it became quite clear that even the finest political and economic minds couldn’t predict the consequences of leaving the EU. What chance did Dave from Harrogate have of making an informed decision. All the referendum did was give Dave from Harrogate a voice with which to rail against foreigners because, after all, couldn’t everyone else see that if we continued with our EU membership we’d all be living under Sharia Law by a week next Tuesday?
Before the official ousting of May and a Tory leadership election can get under way there are still some annoying hurdles for the leading Tory boys to negotiate. Negotiate? Perhaps that’s the wrong choice of word. Anyway, no fewer than eight Brexit related solutions were voted on by MPs tonight, none of which were able to secure a majority, All of which means that we are likely to see May occupying number 10 for some time to come, much to the disgust of the circling vultures. That the Tory Party are trying to use the biggest political issue in the UK for a generation to sort out their own domestic squabbling is one of the most shameful scenarios in British history. There we were spending three years worrying about what the effects of Brexit might be and it turns out that the real issue was about which right wing narcissist will get to take over when the mess is finally cleaned up.
A Tory leadership election seems such a humdrum way to sort that dispute in any case. Why not reflect the times by having them compete in a televised baking contest instead. Something like the Great Celebri-Tory Snake Off. Prue Leith could announce the results 12 hours early just to give it that authentic Bake Off feel. And all the proceeds would of course go to good old Tory causes like The Already Massively Wealthy.
Failing that, and if I could choose my own method of who should replace May, it would be something more like The Hunger Games. A fight to the death within the grounds of the Palace of Westminster with the last man standing sent to Panem to face President Donald Sutherland to negotiate a trade deal. All the while not knowing whether fellow Tribute Peeta would be a help, a hindrance or else just tear off the new PM’s head in a fit of inexplicable rage.
So as we reach the end of March those wags in the gutter press that have helped whip up this Dog’s Brexit are already telling us it’s the end of May. Unless that happens by way of a General Election and the public get the chance to oust this medieval austerity-loving government, sat on the top of their cash pile telling poor people that their greed is crashing the economy, I’m not all that excited about it.
Monday, 23 April 2018
Roy
My first memory of attending a Saints game was around the early 1980s. The mind plays tricks when trying to recall events that happened so long ago, to the point where games start to merge into one and details get mixed up. Yet I’m fairly sure that it came against a pre-Rhino Leeds side.
Or was it Hull FC or Hull KR? I’m unsure but what I am sure of is that in the centres that sunny afternoon was one Roy Haggerty. He scored twice, rampaging through the defence with the bulldozing, high-kicking style that would become his trademark long after a loss of a yard or two of pace and the arrival of the great Mal Meninga forced Roy into the second row.
I wish I could remember the details more clearly now with the news that Roy has passed away at the age of just 58. When you are a child watching your heroes achieve what look like superhuman feats you never contemplate their vulnerability. You never think that one day you will be sitting at your keyboard trying to put into words what they mean to you after their passing. Yet now that he has gone all we have left of him are these cherished memories, fuzzy though they are. Roy scored 115 tries in 363 appearances for Saints between 1978 and 1991. He toured Australia and New Zealand with Great Britain in 1988 and played at Wembley in the Challenge Cup defeats of 1987 and 1989.
That 1987 Cup final defeat to Halifax was my first visit to the national stadium. The following season Roy would kick 13 of the 20 drop-goals of his Saints career, yet I vividly remember him passing up the opportunity to have a pot-shot as Saints trailed by a point in one of the most dramatic cup finals ever played. I nearly blew one of my soon-to-be frail kidneys out from bellowing at him, pleading with him to have a go. Yet in many respects that was classic Roy. A thousand per cent endeavour and effort and no little skill, but never the shrewdest of operators. There are a gazillion urban myths about Roy, from talking to cash machines to informing Australian reporters on tour that he lived at the top of Elephant Lane. These may or may not be true, but they are very Roy and in that they have taken on a life of their own and become somehow plausible.
It certainly wasn’t all disappointments on the field, even if Roy played for Saints at a difficult time in their history. He played in the Lancashire Cup final victory over Wigan at Central Park in 1984, a Premiership Trophy final win over Hull KR at Old Trafford the following year and the memorable 15-14 John Player Trophy success over Leeds in 1988. In this period, the era of such relentless dominance from the mob over the lump, these wins were particularly glorious and sparked arguably even more crazed celebrations than some of the many that followed in the Super League era. By then we had become almost used to winning, and the expectancy and sense of entitlement we had developed could be a little numbing. It’s always more rewarding to taste success when expectations are lower and Roy helped deliver that for us. That alone is a reason to be eternally grateful to him.
Roy was a great player, but it was his accessibility and the time he had for everyone that marked him out as particularly special in my young eyes. In the days before full-time professionalism he would embark on training runs in the street where I grew up. Each and every time he jogged past us as we played whatever sport was on television at the time be it football, rugby, tennis, cricket or even American football there would be the same exchange between Roy and me and my mates;
“Alright Roy…” we’d enquire hopefully;
“Alright lads…” he would always shoot back. Every single time. It’s hard to quantify what even that little bit of interaction with a Saints player meant to a group of nine or ten year-olds but I think that Roy may have understood it. Either that or he genuinely did not feel that he was any different from anybody else in the community in or around the top of Elephant Lane. He was a regular in the off-license where my mum used to work during the 1980s and I have clear memories of her coming home with news of the birth of both of his rugby league playing sons Gareth and Kurt. The latter was, he told my mum, named after the former Widnes prop-forward Kurt Sorensen who Roy greatly admired. Not that it stopped him from bashing Sorensen as hard as he could whenever Saints met the Kiwi's then mighty Widnes side.
That was Roy. Live and die for the shirt which may seem obvious but is not something that you see exuding from everyone who has the privilege to pull on the red vee.
Roy Haggerty - 1960-2018
Or was it Hull FC or Hull KR? I’m unsure but what I am sure of is that in the centres that sunny afternoon was one Roy Haggerty. He scored twice, rampaging through the defence with the bulldozing, high-kicking style that would become his trademark long after a loss of a yard or two of pace and the arrival of the great Mal Meninga forced Roy into the second row.
I wish I could remember the details more clearly now with the news that Roy has passed away at the age of just 58. When you are a child watching your heroes achieve what look like superhuman feats you never contemplate their vulnerability. You never think that one day you will be sitting at your keyboard trying to put into words what they mean to you after their passing. Yet now that he has gone all we have left of him are these cherished memories, fuzzy though they are. Roy scored 115 tries in 363 appearances for Saints between 1978 and 1991. He toured Australia and New Zealand with Great Britain in 1988 and played at Wembley in the Challenge Cup defeats of 1987 and 1989.
That 1987 Cup final defeat to Halifax was my first visit to the national stadium. The following season Roy would kick 13 of the 20 drop-goals of his Saints career, yet I vividly remember him passing up the opportunity to have a pot-shot as Saints trailed by a point in one of the most dramatic cup finals ever played. I nearly blew one of my soon-to-be frail kidneys out from bellowing at him, pleading with him to have a go. Yet in many respects that was classic Roy. A thousand per cent endeavour and effort and no little skill, but never the shrewdest of operators. There are a gazillion urban myths about Roy, from talking to cash machines to informing Australian reporters on tour that he lived at the top of Elephant Lane. These may or may not be true, but they are very Roy and in that they have taken on a life of their own and become somehow plausible.
It certainly wasn’t all disappointments on the field, even if Roy played for Saints at a difficult time in their history. He played in the Lancashire Cup final victory over Wigan at Central Park in 1984, a Premiership Trophy final win over Hull KR at Old Trafford the following year and the memorable 15-14 John Player Trophy success over Leeds in 1988. In this period, the era of such relentless dominance from the mob over the lump, these wins were particularly glorious and sparked arguably even more crazed celebrations than some of the many that followed in the Super League era. By then we had become almost used to winning, and the expectancy and sense of entitlement we had developed could be a little numbing. It’s always more rewarding to taste success when expectations are lower and Roy helped deliver that for us. That alone is a reason to be eternally grateful to him.
Roy was a great player, but it was his accessibility and the time he had for everyone that marked him out as particularly special in my young eyes. In the days before full-time professionalism he would embark on training runs in the street where I grew up. Each and every time he jogged past us as we played whatever sport was on television at the time be it football, rugby, tennis, cricket or even American football there would be the same exchange between Roy and me and my mates;
“Alright Roy…” we’d enquire hopefully;
“Alright lads…” he would always shoot back. Every single time. It’s hard to quantify what even that little bit of interaction with a Saints player meant to a group of nine or ten year-olds but I think that Roy may have understood it. Either that or he genuinely did not feel that he was any different from anybody else in the community in or around the top of Elephant Lane. He was a regular in the off-license where my mum used to work during the 1980s and I have clear memories of her coming home with news of the birth of both of his rugby league playing sons Gareth and Kurt. The latter was, he told my mum, named after the former Widnes prop-forward Kurt Sorensen who Roy greatly admired. Not that it stopped him from bashing Sorensen as hard as he could whenever Saints met the Kiwi's then mighty Widnes side.
That was Roy. Live and die for the shirt which may seem obvious but is not something that you see exuding from everyone who has the privilege to pull on the red vee.
Roy Haggerty - 1960-2018
Sunday, 22 April 2018
5 Talking Points From Saints 66 Huddersfield Giants 4
Harsh Words From Holbrook Do The Trick
Let me take you back a week to the afternath of Saints 24-20 defeat at Wakefield Trinity. I know. You'd rather not relive it but it may have been an important signpost on the road to Friday's 12-try demolition of the Huddersfield Giants.
"They worked harder than us." said Holbrook of Chris Chester's side, adding;
"I was really disappointed with our effort today."
As assessments of performance go this is about as damning as it gets. It's one thing to criticise professional players for missing tackles or dropping easy passes, but quite another to suggest that they are not working hard enough. This could and should have stung the Saints players into the response they came up with against Chris Thorman's admittedly struggling side.
An early Jonny Lomax try gave little indication of the avalanche of points that was to follow in a fairly scruffy opening. It wasn't until Ben Barba scooted past half the Giants team for the kind of try seen on his NRL YouTube compilations that the gulf in class became apparent. Despite missing three of their four England squad regulars in Alex Walmsley, James Roby and the suspended Mark Percival Saints added four more tries before the break. At 34-0 at half-time all questions about their work rate had been answered. Six more tries in the second half underlined the point. Holbrook's words had produced the desired effect.
Do we want this kind of miss-match?
This time last year you would turn up to watch a Saints game with very little idea of whether Keiron Cunningham's side was going to win or not. While pithy wordsmiths like this one seethed about this and put the team's inconsistency down to the tactical shackles imposed on them by the then coach, the club party line was that in a salary capped sport the days of dismissing 90% of visitors who dared darken our crumbling old door were as gone as the Knowsley Road ground. We couldn't go back.
But on Friday night we did go back. Or at least it felt like it. Back to the sunny Sunday afternoons of my youth when the fascination was not in whether we would win, but in wondering by how many and who would get over for the tries. Few sides could entertain like Saints 20-30 years ago and all that came flooding back to mind in two dizzying spells at the end of each half.
So is this what we wanted? Saints scored some scintillating tries with Barba's first of two an obvious highlight, Yet not long after he embarked on that mazy run to the Giants line Barba and his team-mates had killed this as a contest. With over half the game remaining the outcome was not in the merest shred of doubt. Saints hoovered up goodies faster than Richard Madeley on a celebrity edition of Supermarket Sweep. A Giants side that was also missing stars such as Danny Brough, Jermaine McGilvary and Sebastine Ikahihifo offered nothing in response.
Which is all very well as a one-off. The salary cap has done a reasonable job of ensuring that winning margins have shrunk significantly in Super League, even if it can be accused of doing so by dumbing down standards at the top. So you pays your money and takes your choice. Ultra-competitive grinds with little or no flair on show or embarrassing towellings which call into question the quality of the league. At the moment we still seem some way off finding a happy medium.
Costello breaks through
Percival's verbal joust with Gareth Hewer during Saints loss at Wakefield gave an opportunity to Matty Costello. The 20 year-old is more comfortable at fullback but slotted into the threequarters nicely. He could not have wished for a better introduction to Super League level as the Giants folded in the face of the heavy onslaught.
Costello's main contribution was try assists for Lomax and Regan Grace, the latter finally having the confidence to back himself all the way to the line for only his third try of the season. It was Saints 11th try of a night in which Costello announced himself with a solid performance. He managed 68 metres on 13 carries and at times suffered from the same inability to link up with Grace that even Percival is still grappling with. Nobody is suggesting that Costello should be a permanent fixture ahead of Percival or even Ryan Morgan who added two scores of his own in the second half. But the important thing to note is that Costello proved able to step up when needed. With Percival due back from suspension at Salford on Thursday night (April 26) it may be a while before we see Costello again. There are two or three players ahead of him for his favoured fullback berth. But he has nevertheless gained vital experience that must surely aid his development.
But Bentley does not break through
With Zeb Taia one of five first team regulars ruled out through injury this might have been the perfect time to blood James Bentley in the Super League. Holbrook could not have known quite how much of a stroll this one was going to be but he must have been expecting his side to get over the top of a battered Giants outfit. Which greatly reduced the risk around including Bentley, signed in the off-season from Bradford Bulls with a reputation as one of the best players in the Championship.
Those that played ahead of Bentley excelled. Dominique Peyroux made a modest 68 metres but managed 21 tackles, missing just two. He burst out of six tackles and came up with a sensational offload for Lomax's second try. Similarly Jon Wilkin was sprayed with a bit of magic dust when his perfectly timed pass put Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook over, and it was Wilkin's offload which sent Barba weaving his way to the line so memorably. Meanwhile Morgan Knowles had a hand in Lomax's opening score, ran for 110 metres and came up with 36 tackles. Anyone trying to make a case for the inclusion of Bentley might well find themselves presented with these impressive feats as evidence that leaving Bentley out was the right call.
Yet if not this game, then when will we see Bentley in 2018? Saints enter the Challenge Cup draw this week and a favourable pairing may offer another opportunity. But if Bentley isn't required when so many stars are missing and when the opponent still looks highly vulnerable it may be a worrying sign that the young back rower has not convinced the coach that he is Super League ready.
They might be Giants....but we can't see them..
Away support is not particularly valued or deemed necessary in some sports. The NFL has no culture of visiting fans and sets no store by it. Similarly the NRL doesn't worry about it, moving games hours away at the drop of a hat safe in the knowledge that they will find someone, anyone, to stick their bum on a seat.
British sporting culture is slightly different and it was alarming to see the entire East Stand devoid of any Giants fans. Only a couple of flags, one depicting a fairly grumpy-looking Giants chairman Ken Davy, were taking up any space in the main section normally reserved for visiting fans. There were some in the north east corner, including the Twitter celebrity that owns the cow bell, but in truth it would be a surprise if more than a couple of taxis were required to get them down the M62 on Friday night.
If this were Catalans or London it would be nothing new. Empty away ends is something that Super League clubs have had to accept down the years to help pursue the goal of ensuring that Super League stretches outside of the northern towns of its stereotyping. But this is Huddersfield. Birthplace of the game itself. League Leaders Shield winners only five years ago. Is it really too much to ask that a few more are willing to travel an hour down the road, even if it is a Friday night and even if their side is expected to lose? Or is Friday night just an excuse that fans hide behind? Would any more have turned up had the game been played on a Sunday afternoon?
It's never made much sense to host games at exactly the same time as others are being televised. You are either eliminating a high portion of your targeted viewing audience or you are giving potential match-goers a reason to make a trip to the off-license their only outside venture on those evenings. That Sky allow it to continue is an unnerving indicator of their apathy towards the sport. Almost as if they don't care if away sections are empty or viewing figures for RL are lower as long as people are still subscribing to see Premier League football. This is an issue which needs to be seriously examined by all parties before the agreement of the next broadcasting deal, negotiations for which are surely to start imminently.
Let me take you back a week to the afternath of Saints 24-20 defeat at Wakefield Trinity. I know. You'd rather not relive it but it may have been an important signpost on the road to Friday's 12-try demolition of the Huddersfield Giants.
"They worked harder than us." said Holbrook of Chris Chester's side, adding;
"I was really disappointed with our effort today."
As assessments of performance go this is about as damning as it gets. It's one thing to criticise professional players for missing tackles or dropping easy passes, but quite another to suggest that they are not working hard enough. This could and should have stung the Saints players into the response they came up with against Chris Thorman's admittedly struggling side.
An early Jonny Lomax try gave little indication of the avalanche of points that was to follow in a fairly scruffy opening. It wasn't until Ben Barba scooted past half the Giants team for the kind of try seen on his NRL YouTube compilations that the gulf in class became apparent. Despite missing three of their four England squad regulars in Alex Walmsley, James Roby and the suspended Mark Percival Saints added four more tries before the break. At 34-0 at half-time all questions about their work rate had been answered. Six more tries in the second half underlined the point. Holbrook's words had produced the desired effect.
Do we want this kind of miss-match?
This time last year you would turn up to watch a Saints game with very little idea of whether Keiron Cunningham's side was going to win or not. While pithy wordsmiths like this one seethed about this and put the team's inconsistency down to the tactical shackles imposed on them by the then coach, the club party line was that in a salary capped sport the days of dismissing 90% of visitors who dared darken our crumbling old door were as gone as the Knowsley Road ground. We couldn't go back.
But on Friday night we did go back. Or at least it felt like it. Back to the sunny Sunday afternoons of my youth when the fascination was not in whether we would win, but in wondering by how many and who would get over for the tries. Few sides could entertain like Saints 20-30 years ago and all that came flooding back to mind in two dizzying spells at the end of each half.
So is this what we wanted? Saints scored some scintillating tries with Barba's first of two an obvious highlight, Yet not long after he embarked on that mazy run to the Giants line Barba and his team-mates had killed this as a contest. With over half the game remaining the outcome was not in the merest shred of doubt. Saints hoovered up goodies faster than Richard Madeley on a celebrity edition of Supermarket Sweep. A Giants side that was also missing stars such as Danny Brough, Jermaine McGilvary and Sebastine Ikahihifo offered nothing in response.
Which is all very well as a one-off. The salary cap has done a reasonable job of ensuring that winning margins have shrunk significantly in Super League, even if it can be accused of doing so by dumbing down standards at the top. So you pays your money and takes your choice. Ultra-competitive grinds with little or no flair on show or embarrassing towellings which call into question the quality of the league. At the moment we still seem some way off finding a happy medium.
Costello breaks through
Percival's verbal joust with Gareth Hewer during Saints loss at Wakefield gave an opportunity to Matty Costello. The 20 year-old is more comfortable at fullback but slotted into the threequarters nicely. He could not have wished for a better introduction to Super League level as the Giants folded in the face of the heavy onslaught.
Costello's main contribution was try assists for Lomax and Regan Grace, the latter finally having the confidence to back himself all the way to the line for only his third try of the season. It was Saints 11th try of a night in which Costello announced himself with a solid performance. He managed 68 metres on 13 carries and at times suffered from the same inability to link up with Grace that even Percival is still grappling with. Nobody is suggesting that Costello should be a permanent fixture ahead of Percival or even Ryan Morgan who added two scores of his own in the second half. But the important thing to note is that Costello proved able to step up when needed. With Percival due back from suspension at Salford on Thursday night (April 26) it may be a while before we see Costello again. There are two or three players ahead of him for his favoured fullback berth. But he has nevertheless gained vital experience that must surely aid his development.
But Bentley does not break through
With Zeb Taia one of five first team regulars ruled out through injury this might have been the perfect time to blood James Bentley in the Super League. Holbrook could not have known quite how much of a stroll this one was going to be but he must have been expecting his side to get over the top of a battered Giants outfit. Which greatly reduced the risk around including Bentley, signed in the off-season from Bradford Bulls with a reputation as one of the best players in the Championship.
Those that played ahead of Bentley excelled. Dominique Peyroux made a modest 68 metres but managed 21 tackles, missing just two. He burst out of six tackles and came up with a sensational offload for Lomax's second try. Similarly Jon Wilkin was sprayed with a bit of magic dust when his perfectly timed pass put Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook over, and it was Wilkin's offload which sent Barba weaving his way to the line so memorably. Meanwhile Morgan Knowles had a hand in Lomax's opening score, ran for 110 metres and came up with 36 tackles. Anyone trying to make a case for the inclusion of Bentley might well find themselves presented with these impressive feats as evidence that leaving Bentley out was the right call.
Yet if not this game, then when will we see Bentley in 2018? Saints enter the Challenge Cup draw this week and a favourable pairing may offer another opportunity. But if Bentley isn't required when so many stars are missing and when the opponent still looks highly vulnerable it may be a worrying sign that the young back rower has not convinced the coach that he is Super League ready.
They might be Giants....but we can't see them..
Away support is not particularly valued or deemed necessary in some sports. The NFL has no culture of visiting fans and sets no store by it. Similarly the NRL doesn't worry about it, moving games hours away at the drop of a hat safe in the knowledge that they will find someone, anyone, to stick their bum on a seat.
British sporting culture is slightly different and it was alarming to see the entire East Stand devoid of any Giants fans. Only a couple of flags, one depicting a fairly grumpy-looking Giants chairman Ken Davy, were taking up any space in the main section normally reserved for visiting fans. There were some in the north east corner, including the Twitter celebrity that owns the cow bell, but in truth it would be a surprise if more than a couple of taxis were required to get them down the M62 on Friday night.
If this were Catalans or London it would be nothing new. Empty away ends is something that Super League clubs have had to accept down the years to help pursue the goal of ensuring that Super League stretches outside of the northern towns of its stereotyping. But this is Huddersfield. Birthplace of the game itself. League Leaders Shield winners only five years ago. Is it really too much to ask that a few more are willing to travel an hour down the road, even if it is a Friday night and even if their side is expected to lose? Or is Friday night just an excuse that fans hide behind? Would any more have turned up had the game been played on a Sunday afternoon?
It's never made much sense to host games at exactly the same time as others are being televised. You are either eliminating a high portion of your targeted viewing audience or you are giving potential match-goers a reason to make a trip to the off-license their only outside venture on those evenings. That Sky allow it to continue is an unnerving indicator of their apathy towards the sport. Almost as if they don't care if away sections are empty or viewing figures for RL are lower as long as people are still subscribing to see Premier League football. This is an issue which needs to be seriously examined by all parties before the agreement of the next broadcasting deal, negotiations for which are surely to start imminently.
Wednesday, 18 April 2018
Saints v Huddersfield Giants - Preview
Saints will look to bounce back from a rude jarring of their collective ego when they host Huddersfield Giants in a BetFred Super League Round 12 meeting on Friday night (April 20, kick-off 8.00pm).
Justin Holbrook’s side suffered only their second loss in 11 league outings in 2018 when they went down 24-20 at Wakefield Trinity last Sunday (April 15). The result has since prompted much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the fans who rounded on portly whistle-blower and hate figure of the week Gareth Hewer. Yet the ugly truth is that Hewer got the two big decisions right, neglecting to award a penalty try when Jonny Lomax was in the vicinity of the try-line and then inviting Mark Percival to sit down for 10 minutes for a petulant bout of gum-flapping after he was obstructed on his way to never in a million years reaching his own kick through.
Percival has paid for that unwelcome expression of his opinion with a one-match suspension and so sits out this one. And that is not all. Saints will also be without the talismanic James Roby, longer term absentees Alex Walmsley and Adam Swift as well as Zeb Taia. The former Catalans man is replaced in the squad by James Bentley, a pre-season signing from Bradford Bulls who has yet to see the light of day in a Saints shirt but of whom big things are expected. Taia’s absence offers a real opportunity for Holbrook to back up comments earlier in the season about giving youth an opportunity but there is still the possibility that he will move Jon Wilkin into the second row to play alongside in-form Dominique Peyroux and promote Morgan Knowles off the bench to start at 13.
The props should remain unaltered with new pack leader Luke Thompson joined by the over-achieving Luke Douglas, Kyle Amor and Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook in the rotation, while either Matty Smith or Theo Fages will take Roby’s hooking role. Smith started at Wakefield but there was a feeling that the speed of Saints game went up a notch or three when Fages joined the action. However, that is not to say that Fages should automatically start ahead of Smith. It may be that Fages injection of pace was aided by the fact that he was introduced against tired bodies later in the game and that Smith’s steady presence will be required early on. Along with Bentley, Jack Ashworth makes the 19 and could come into contention in the pack as well as Matty Lees who again finds himself required for first team duty but faces another disappointing omission from the final 17.
What to do about the backs then in Percival and Swift’s absences? Matty Costello retains his place in the 19-man squad and Holbrook has said publicly that it is likely that the youngster will get a run at centre. Whether this will be as a direct replacement for Percival on the left inside of Regan Grace is unknown. Ryan Morgan may swap sides to allow Costello to operate on Saints less busy right hand edge inside of Tommy Makinson. If Holbrook has a change of heart and decides that Costello is not ready for his Super League debut then other options include Lomax, who has played in the centres in emergencies already this term, and Peyroux who joined the club as a centre before finding his best rugby in the second row. The three-quarter line will of course have the luxury of playing in front of the incomparable Ben Barba, who might just beat a banged up Huddersfield team by himself should the mood take him.
Among the absentees for the still coachless Giants are fullback Jake Mamo, England winger Jermaine McGilvary, centre Leroy Cudjoe and the suspended Danny Brough. The latter talked his way into trouble during last week’s 30-12 home defeat to Salford Red Devils and has picked up a three-game ban. Brough was sent off for channelling his inner Percy and gobbing off, this time at a touch judge, and will miss matches against Saints, Warrington and Widnes. Jordan Rankin could step into the fullback role vacated by Mamo, while Innes Senior and Darnell McIntosh operated on the wings against Ian Watson’s side last time out. Former Saint Jordan Turner looks set for a centre berth alongside Aaron Murphy while Brough’s absence gives caretaker coach Chris Thorman a bit of a headache in the halves. Lee Gaskell is another ex-Saint who should feature there but whoever ends up in Brough’s scrum-half role is likely to be inexperienced, playing out of position or both.
The pack looks a little stronger with Sebastine Ikahihifo, Shannon Wakeman and Ryan Hinchcliffe leading the way. Oliver Roberts, Ukuma Ta’ai and Daniel Smith should all feature with Kruise Leeming operating from dummy half. Paul Clough is another who used to earn his living in the red vee and he may start at prop.
In contrast to Saints fast start the Giants have struggled throughout 2018 so far, winning only 2 of their first 11, and having to cope with the upheaval of the sacking of head coach Rick Stone. This side can sometimes be so bad that it loses to Catalans Dragons, a side which you would fully expect to be soundly beaten by the Whipping Boys Select XIII should such a team ever exist and their paths ever cross. It is insanely difficult to see anything but a Saints win even without a few first team regulars, such is the relative depth of the two squads.
The teams have already met once this season, Saints earning a 26-12 success at the John Smith’s Stadium on a cold night in February of the kind that used to decide titles, but now just makes you wonder whether it might not be more pertinent to start the season in April. The Giants had a lot of possession in the first half in that one but even with Brough and company on the field they could not convert that into points against a resolute Saints defence. Without the Scotland halfback and the classy McGilvary it is going to be even more challenging for the Giants who should be handled by a margin somewhere around the 20-point mark.
Squads;
St Helens;
1. Jonny Lomax, 2. Tommy Makinson, 3. Ryan Morgan, 6. Theo Fages, 7. Matty Smith, 10. Kyle Amor, 12. Jon Wilkin, 13. Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook, 14. Luke Douglas, 15. Morgan Knowles, 16. Luke Thompson, 17. Dom Peyroux, 18. Danny Richardson, 19. Regan Grace, 20. Matty Lees, 21. Jack Ashworth, 23. Ben Barba, 24. James Bentley, 30. Matty Costello
Huddersfield Giants;
4. Jordan Turner, 5. Aaron Murphy, 6. Lee Gaskell, 8. Sebastine Ikahihifo, 9. Kruise Leeming, 10. Shannon Wakeman, 13. Ryan Hinchcliffe, 15. Jordan Rankin, 16. Oliver Roberts, 17. Ukuma Ta’ai, 18. Paul Clough, 19. Daniel Smith, 20. Adam Walne, 22. Alex Mellor, 23. Darnell McIntosh, 24. Tyler Dickinson, 25. Corlton Roche, 26. Sam Wood, 33. Innes Senior.
Referee: Scott Mikalauskas
Justin Holbrook’s side suffered only their second loss in 11 league outings in 2018 when they went down 24-20 at Wakefield Trinity last Sunday (April 15). The result has since prompted much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the fans who rounded on portly whistle-blower and hate figure of the week Gareth Hewer. Yet the ugly truth is that Hewer got the two big decisions right, neglecting to award a penalty try when Jonny Lomax was in the vicinity of the try-line and then inviting Mark Percival to sit down for 10 minutes for a petulant bout of gum-flapping after he was obstructed on his way to never in a million years reaching his own kick through.
Percival has paid for that unwelcome expression of his opinion with a one-match suspension and so sits out this one. And that is not all. Saints will also be without the talismanic James Roby, longer term absentees Alex Walmsley and Adam Swift as well as Zeb Taia. The former Catalans man is replaced in the squad by James Bentley, a pre-season signing from Bradford Bulls who has yet to see the light of day in a Saints shirt but of whom big things are expected. Taia’s absence offers a real opportunity for Holbrook to back up comments earlier in the season about giving youth an opportunity but there is still the possibility that he will move Jon Wilkin into the second row to play alongside in-form Dominique Peyroux and promote Morgan Knowles off the bench to start at 13.
The props should remain unaltered with new pack leader Luke Thompson joined by the over-achieving Luke Douglas, Kyle Amor and Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook in the rotation, while either Matty Smith or Theo Fages will take Roby’s hooking role. Smith started at Wakefield but there was a feeling that the speed of Saints game went up a notch or three when Fages joined the action. However, that is not to say that Fages should automatically start ahead of Smith. It may be that Fages injection of pace was aided by the fact that he was introduced against tired bodies later in the game and that Smith’s steady presence will be required early on. Along with Bentley, Jack Ashworth makes the 19 and could come into contention in the pack as well as Matty Lees who again finds himself required for first team duty but faces another disappointing omission from the final 17.
What to do about the backs then in Percival and Swift’s absences? Matty Costello retains his place in the 19-man squad and Holbrook has said publicly that it is likely that the youngster will get a run at centre. Whether this will be as a direct replacement for Percival on the left inside of Regan Grace is unknown. Ryan Morgan may swap sides to allow Costello to operate on Saints less busy right hand edge inside of Tommy Makinson. If Holbrook has a change of heart and decides that Costello is not ready for his Super League debut then other options include Lomax, who has played in the centres in emergencies already this term, and Peyroux who joined the club as a centre before finding his best rugby in the second row. The three-quarter line will of course have the luxury of playing in front of the incomparable Ben Barba, who might just beat a banged up Huddersfield team by himself should the mood take him.
Among the absentees for the still coachless Giants are fullback Jake Mamo, England winger Jermaine McGilvary, centre Leroy Cudjoe and the suspended Danny Brough. The latter talked his way into trouble during last week’s 30-12 home defeat to Salford Red Devils and has picked up a three-game ban. Brough was sent off for channelling his inner Percy and gobbing off, this time at a touch judge, and will miss matches against Saints, Warrington and Widnes. Jordan Rankin could step into the fullback role vacated by Mamo, while Innes Senior and Darnell McIntosh operated on the wings against Ian Watson’s side last time out. Former Saint Jordan Turner looks set for a centre berth alongside Aaron Murphy while Brough’s absence gives caretaker coach Chris Thorman a bit of a headache in the halves. Lee Gaskell is another ex-Saint who should feature there but whoever ends up in Brough’s scrum-half role is likely to be inexperienced, playing out of position or both.
The pack looks a little stronger with Sebastine Ikahihifo, Shannon Wakeman and Ryan Hinchcliffe leading the way. Oliver Roberts, Ukuma Ta’ai and Daniel Smith should all feature with Kruise Leeming operating from dummy half. Paul Clough is another who used to earn his living in the red vee and he may start at prop.
In contrast to Saints fast start the Giants have struggled throughout 2018 so far, winning only 2 of their first 11, and having to cope with the upheaval of the sacking of head coach Rick Stone. This side can sometimes be so bad that it loses to Catalans Dragons, a side which you would fully expect to be soundly beaten by the Whipping Boys Select XIII should such a team ever exist and their paths ever cross. It is insanely difficult to see anything but a Saints win even without a few first team regulars, such is the relative depth of the two squads.
The teams have already met once this season, Saints earning a 26-12 success at the John Smith’s Stadium on a cold night in February of the kind that used to decide titles, but now just makes you wonder whether it might not be more pertinent to start the season in April. The Giants had a lot of possession in the first half in that one but even with Brough and company on the field they could not convert that into points against a resolute Saints defence. Without the Scotland halfback and the classy McGilvary it is going to be even more challenging for the Giants who should be handled by a margin somewhere around the 20-point mark.
Squads;
St Helens;
1. Jonny Lomax, 2. Tommy Makinson, 3. Ryan Morgan, 6. Theo Fages, 7. Matty Smith, 10. Kyle Amor, 12. Jon Wilkin, 13. Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook, 14. Luke Douglas, 15. Morgan Knowles, 16. Luke Thompson, 17. Dom Peyroux, 18. Danny Richardson, 19. Regan Grace, 20. Matty Lees, 21. Jack Ashworth, 23. Ben Barba, 24. James Bentley, 30. Matty Costello
Huddersfield Giants;
4. Jordan Turner, 5. Aaron Murphy, 6. Lee Gaskell, 8. Sebastine Ikahihifo, 9. Kruise Leeming, 10. Shannon Wakeman, 13. Ryan Hinchcliffe, 15. Jordan Rankin, 16. Oliver Roberts, 17. Ukuma Ta’ai, 18. Paul Clough, 19. Daniel Smith, 20. Adam Walne, 22. Alex Mellor, 23. Darnell McIntosh, 24. Tyler Dickinson, 25. Corlton Roche, 26. Sam Wood, 33. Innes Senior.
Referee: Scott Mikalauskas
Friday, 13 April 2018
Wakefield Trinity v Saints - Preview
Table-toppers Saints will look to continue their excellent 2018 form when they travel to the ludicrously named Mobile Rocket Stadium to face Wakefield Trinity on Sunday (April 15, kick-off 3.00pm).
Justin Holbrook’s side earned their ninth win from 10 Super League outings so far this season when they beat Hull 26-12 at home last week. By the time this one kicks off they will have had nine full days to recover from the hectic Easter schedule and prepare. That should be enough to recharge the batteries and focus on beating a very decent Trinity side whose form has dipped in recent weeks after a solid start. Yet Trinity’s five defeats in a row over the last month have come by a combined margin of just 30 points at an average of just six points a game. This is a side whose current position of seventh in the league is unflattering.
Beating Chris Chester’s side is made that bit more difficult for Saints by the absence of James Roby. The England hooker has been right up there with Ben Barba as one of the stars of the Saints show so far this term but he misses out this week. He left the victory over Hull FC just after half-time with a rib injury, immediately prompting Holbrook to suggest that Roby’s involvement at Wakefield seemed unlikely. So it has proved, with Matty Costello drafted in to the 19-man squad for the first time this season in the only change from last week’s selection.
You’re way ahead of me I know but the obvious thing to state is that Costello is not a hooker, and therefore not a direct replacement for Roby. Most often Costello is a fullback, which may or may not cast doubts about whether Barba is ready to return having been side-lined through illness for the Hull FC game. Yet Jonny Lomax did a fine job in relief of the Aussie star and would be favourite to do so again should Barba have failed to recover. Barba’s selection seems to suggest a return to stand-off for Lomax with Theo Fages returning to the bench after deputising at 6 with varying degrees of success at Widnes and against Lee Radford’s black and whites. That would leave Tommy Makinson and Regan Grace to occupy the wings with Adam Swift still out with a shoulder injury, and Ryan Morgan and Mark Percival in the centres. Danny Richardson is now the established starter at scrum-half.
The most likely candidate to replace Roby is Matty Smith. The former England scrum-half has slotted in at hooker during both of the last two games and done fairly well in the role. It is impossible to replace what Roby gives you at dummy half but Smith’s tactical nous and passing ability allied to his willingness to work defensively should see him get the nod. Fages is another option in that role while either could be moved into the halves should circumstances dictate. Fortunately for Saints, while they have no specialist hooker to back-up Roby, they do have an array of halfbacks who are adaptable and can be moved around to different positions depending on where the gaps exist.
The forward pack is now missing its two best players with Roby joining the already side-lined Alex Walmsley. Kyle Amor, Luke Douglas and Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook have all stepped up admirably in the absence of Walmsley and they will all again look to contribute in support of Luke Thompson. Due to a combination of Walmsley’s injury and his own form Thompson has emerged as Saints most reliable prop in 2018 and will be crucial again for Holbrook’s side. Matty Lees is again named in the 19 but will do well to break into the side with those ahead of him in the pecking order in fine fettle in terms of their form. Behind that group Zeb Taia continues to cop the flak from fans for failing to be Joe Greenwood, but the reality is that the former Gold Coast man bagged another two tries and 145 metres against FC and is arguably Saints most dangerous forward with ball in hand. Jon Wilkin, Morgan Knowles and Dominique Peyroux are a more than adequate support cast.
Wakefield may welcome back Scott Grix at fullback after he missed his side’s 28-26 defeat to Leeds Rhinos last weekend. He replaces Max Jowitt in one of four changes to Chester’s 19-man squad which see all of Liam Finn, Chris Annakin and Anthony England return. As well as Jowitt James Batchelor, Pauli Pauli and Ryan Hampshire miss out as Chester looks to find the right combination to get his side back to winning ways.
Trinity have pace in the backs with Ben Jones-Bishop and Tom Johnstone on the wings and Bill Tupou and Reece Lyne at centre. Finn will look to start in the halves alongside Jacob Miller while the pack includes the vastly under-rated former Saint Matty Ashurst as well as England, Tyler Randell, Justin Horo, Craig Huby and Danny Kirmond. Jordan Baldwinson, Tinirau Arona and Joe Arundel will all look to feature also and the presence of all shows that this is a Wakefield squad which contains far more depth than many of its predecessors in the Super League era.
For most sides Saints have been too hot to handle this season so far and with Wakefield stuck in something of a rut results-wise it is difficult to see how they halt that momentum even at home against a Roby-less Saints outfit. They will be competitive however, and their desperation to end their poor run of form may get an extra 10% out of them as the regular season reaches its half way point and wins become ever more precious. Yet with Barba likely to return and Smith a capable deputy for Roby a 10th win from 11 still seems the most likely outcome. Saints by 6.
Squads;
Wakefield Trinity;
1.Scott Grix, 2. Tom Johnstone, 3. Pio Tupou, 4. Reece Lyne, 5. Ben Jones-Bishop, 6. Jacob Miller, 7. Liam Finn, 9. Kyle Wood, 10. Anthony England, 11. Matthew Ashurst, 12. Daniel Kirmond, 13. Tyler Randell, 14. Justin Horo, 16. Tinirau Arona, 17. Craig Huby, 18. Joseph Arundel, 20. Keegan Hirst, 22. Jordan Baldwinson, 23. Christopher Annakin.
St Helens;
1.Jonny Lomax, 2. Tommy Makinson, 3. Ryan Morgan, 4. Mark Percival, 6. Theo Fages, 7. Matty Smith, 10. Kyle Amor, 11. Zeb Taia, 12. Jon Wilkin, 13. Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook, 14. Luke Douglas, 15. Morgan Knowles, 16. Luke Thompson, 17. Dom Peyroux, 18. Danny Richardson, 19. Regan Grace, 20. Matty Lees, 23. Ben Barba, 30. Matty Costello.
Referee: Gareth Hewer
Justin Holbrook’s side earned their ninth win from 10 Super League outings so far this season when they beat Hull 26-12 at home last week. By the time this one kicks off they will have had nine full days to recover from the hectic Easter schedule and prepare. That should be enough to recharge the batteries and focus on beating a very decent Trinity side whose form has dipped in recent weeks after a solid start. Yet Trinity’s five defeats in a row over the last month have come by a combined margin of just 30 points at an average of just six points a game. This is a side whose current position of seventh in the league is unflattering.
Beating Chris Chester’s side is made that bit more difficult for Saints by the absence of James Roby. The England hooker has been right up there with Ben Barba as one of the stars of the Saints show so far this term but he misses out this week. He left the victory over Hull FC just after half-time with a rib injury, immediately prompting Holbrook to suggest that Roby’s involvement at Wakefield seemed unlikely. So it has proved, with Matty Costello drafted in to the 19-man squad for the first time this season in the only change from last week’s selection.
You’re way ahead of me I know but the obvious thing to state is that Costello is not a hooker, and therefore not a direct replacement for Roby. Most often Costello is a fullback, which may or may not cast doubts about whether Barba is ready to return having been side-lined through illness for the Hull FC game. Yet Jonny Lomax did a fine job in relief of the Aussie star and would be favourite to do so again should Barba have failed to recover. Barba’s selection seems to suggest a return to stand-off for Lomax with Theo Fages returning to the bench after deputising at 6 with varying degrees of success at Widnes and against Lee Radford’s black and whites. That would leave Tommy Makinson and Regan Grace to occupy the wings with Adam Swift still out with a shoulder injury, and Ryan Morgan and Mark Percival in the centres. Danny Richardson is now the established starter at scrum-half.
The most likely candidate to replace Roby is Matty Smith. The former England scrum-half has slotted in at hooker during both of the last two games and done fairly well in the role. It is impossible to replace what Roby gives you at dummy half but Smith’s tactical nous and passing ability allied to his willingness to work defensively should see him get the nod. Fages is another option in that role while either could be moved into the halves should circumstances dictate. Fortunately for Saints, while they have no specialist hooker to back-up Roby, they do have an array of halfbacks who are adaptable and can be moved around to different positions depending on where the gaps exist.
The forward pack is now missing its two best players with Roby joining the already side-lined Alex Walmsley. Kyle Amor, Luke Douglas and Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook have all stepped up admirably in the absence of Walmsley and they will all again look to contribute in support of Luke Thompson. Due to a combination of Walmsley’s injury and his own form Thompson has emerged as Saints most reliable prop in 2018 and will be crucial again for Holbrook’s side. Matty Lees is again named in the 19 but will do well to break into the side with those ahead of him in the pecking order in fine fettle in terms of their form. Behind that group Zeb Taia continues to cop the flak from fans for failing to be Joe Greenwood, but the reality is that the former Gold Coast man bagged another two tries and 145 metres against FC and is arguably Saints most dangerous forward with ball in hand. Jon Wilkin, Morgan Knowles and Dominique Peyroux are a more than adequate support cast.
Wakefield may welcome back Scott Grix at fullback after he missed his side’s 28-26 defeat to Leeds Rhinos last weekend. He replaces Max Jowitt in one of four changes to Chester’s 19-man squad which see all of Liam Finn, Chris Annakin and Anthony England return. As well as Jowitt James Batchelor, Pauli Pauli and Ryan Hampshire miss out as Chester looks to find the right combination to get his side back to winning ways.
Trinity have pace in the backs with Ben Jones-Bishop and Tom Johnstone on the wings and Bill Tupou and Reece Lyne at centre. Finn will look to start in the halves alongside Jacob Miller while the pack includes the vastly under-rated former Saint Matty Ashurst as well as England, Tyler Randell, Justin Horo, Craig Huby and Danny Kirmond. Jordan Baldwinson, Tinirau Arona and Joe Arundel will all look to feature also and the presence of all shows that this is a Wakefield squad which contains far more depth than many of its predecessors in the Super League era.
For most sides Saints have been too hot to handle this season so far and with Wakefield stuck in something of a rut results-wise it is difficult to see how they halt that momentum even at home against a Roby-less Saints outfit. They will be competitive however, and their desperation to end their poor run of form may get an extra 10% out of them as the regular season reaches its half way point and wins become ever more precious. Yet with Barba likely to return and Smith a capable deputy for Roby a 10th win from 11 still seems the most likely outcome. Saints by 6.
Squads;
Wakefield Trinity;
1.Scott Grix, 2. Tom Johnstone, 3. Pio Tupou, 4. Reece Lyne, 5. Ben Jones-Bishop, 6. Jacob Miller, 7. Liam Finn, 9. Kyle Wood, 10. Anthony England, 11. Matthew Ashurst, 12. Daniel Kirmond, 13. Tyler Randell, 14. Justin Horo, 16. Tinirau Arona, 17. Craig Huby, 18. Joseph Arundel, 20. Keegan Hirst, 22. Jordan Baldwinson, 23. Christopher Annakin.
St Helens;
1.Jonny Lomax, 2. Tommy Makinson, 3. Ryan Morgan, 4. Mark Percival, 6. Theo Fages, 7. Matty Smith, 10. Kyle Amor, 11. Zeb Taia, 12. Jon Wilkin, 13. Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook, 14. Luke Douglas, 15. Morgan Knowles, 16. Luke Thompson, 17. Dom Peyroux, 18. Danny Richardson, 19. Regan Grace, 20. Matty Lees, 23. Ben Barba, 30. Matty Costello.
Referee: Gareth Hewer
Tuesday, 10 April 2018
5 Talking Points From Saints 26 Hull FC 12
This is not a one man team
In the lead-up to this one I happened to catch wannabe shock-jock and Hull FC fan Adrian Durham gloating about the absence of Ben Barba from the Saints line-up. Barba missed out through illness prompting Durham to declare himself 'very, very happy' at what he saw as an opportunity for his black and whites. But what he and many others had failed to take into account was the fact that Saints had an England international waiting to step in.
Jonny Lomax stepped seamlessly into his pre-Barba role. Safe under the high ball and with the ability to join up with the attack, Lomax claimed 131 metres on 18 carries and assisted Mark Percival's crucial try early in the second half which came after a neat move from a scrum. That gave Saints some much needed breathing space after a tight first 40 in which Zeb Taia's converted try was the only score.
Any team would miss a player of the class of Barba. He has 10 tries to his name already this season and has been at the heart of pretty much everything Saints have done in both attack and defence in the early part of 2018. It was noticable that Saints lacked a little bit of direction in the FC 20-metre zone in an error filled first half but it was encouraging to see Saints fix that up after half-time, with Lomax central to that. This is far from a one man team. Though without Barba it is essentially the same team which was struggling under Keiron Cunningham this time last year, it is difficult to think of too many players who haven't improved under the tutelage of Justin Holbrook. Fans of other clubs would no doubt rather their team face Saints without Barba than with him but they should not get too excited if they don't see the Australian fullback's name on the teamsheet.
But will the squad be tested?
Barba isn't the only man that Saints have to worry about doing without. Alex Walmsley has been ruled out for the long term with a fractured bone in his neck and though no time frame has been set for his return it will be a surprise if Engy the England prop sees action again in 2018. Adam Swift is midway through what was predicted to be a six-week lay-off with a shoulder injury which is doing more to keep Regan Grace in the team than anything the Welshman has mustered in recent weeks. While these absences hardly constitute an injury crisis of 2014 proportions they do indicate that the squad is about to be tested. Four years ago Saints came up with the revolutionary strategy of winning the League Leaders Shield and the Grand Final with Johnny Vegas and Stan Wall in the halves, but this vintage faces some different challenges.
With Barba expected back the key concern ahead of the weekend visit to Wakefield Trinity surrounds James Roby. The skipper left this one early in the second half with a rib injury, with Holbrook calling it 'a big ask' to expect Roby to be fit for the trip east. Where Barba was replaced by another fullback of international pedigree in Lomax, Roby's place will likely go to the previously ostracised Matty Smith. The man who would take us to the Promised Land as a scrum half does not lack the work rate or the tactical nous to do the job, but the bold truth is that he is not a natural hooker. Even if he were he could not hope to compensate for Roby's absence. There isn't another hooker in Super League who could come into a side and play at Roby's level, so to expect a part-timer like Smith to do so is as fanciful as expecting him to take us to the Promised Land as a 7. Theo Fages may also see some action in the role although he has recently been needed at stand-off in the absence of Lomax at Widnes and Barba here. Holbrook has options but you wouldn't like to find out what would happen if we lost one of two more.
THAT forward pass.
Despite it having about as much influence on the result as a running track at West Ham social media has been alight with fury at the award of Hull's first try scored by Albert Kelly. Holbrook had identified the stand-off as one of the main threats pre-game but even he couldn't have envisaged that Kelly would do it disguised as a wide receiver. The pass he collected from Jack Logan before scooting away to score was so far forward it might have qualified Logan for the javelin final at the Commonwealth Games. Yet neither referee Robert Hicks nor his touch judge on the south side of the ground spotted it. Everyone else did, including Wigan cheerleader and self parody Phil Clarke who could only offer Barba's super slo-mo knock on at Widnes on Easter Monday as justification. The largest endorsement of two wrongs equalling a right since Theresa May actually listened to the Amsterdam bridge beer-chuckers and went through with Brexit.
It all begs the question why we cannot use the video evidence to rule on forward passes. Especially since the notion that it all evens itself out over a season is the kind of total bollocks reserved only for those who have recently benefitted from an incompetent decision by a referee. We review everything else, to the point now where players are being yellow carded several hours after an infringement, yet we steadfastly cling on to the idea that 21st century camera technology cannot shed light on whether a pass has left the hands and then travelled in a forward direction. Even the buffoons in rugby union, who seem to do everything later than we do with the exception of organising credible international competition, have cottoned on to the idea that replays are helpful in this regard. It may not have mattered here but a gross error such as this could really cost somebody. If we have to have the annoyance of the video referee at all then ruling on forward passes should be included as a matter of urgency. Otherwise let's just get rid of it altogether and take our chances.
The re-enforcements step up
If I'm honest with you I've spent an awful lot of time since the Warrington win fretting about what this column has previously declared a lack of quality at prop in the absence of Walmsley. I've done this partly because it distracts me from anything approaching a real problem, but partly because the back-ups are Kyle Amor, Luke Douglas and Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook. Disappointingly we have yet to see Matty Lees since Walmsley's injury.
Yet perhaps I fretted too soon. All of that trio of Amor, Douglas and McCarthy-Scarsbrook have been excellent over the Easter period and all upped their game again in this one. All three broke the 100 metre barrier that simplistic chancers like me consider a minimum for front rowers. With Luke Thompson following suit and now looked upon as something of a leader by example in that group suddenly the void left by Walmsley, while still fairly sizeable, is not one that looks impossible to fill. If the support cast can add consistency to their performance a run of form that has seen Saints win nine of their first 10 Super League games could continue into the second half of the regular season.
Time for a breather
On which subject Saints next assignment sees them go to the laughably named Mobile Rocket Stadium to face Chris Chester's Wakefield Trinity on Sunday (April 15). Ordinarily in action on Fridays, that extra 48 hours preparation is very welcome after an Easter programme that has taken in three games in the space of eight days for Saints and Hull.
Too much is perhaps made of the time clubs have between games. Who isn't tired of seeing Denis Betts or Steve McNamara bang on about 'short turnarounds' after their latest defeat? But following a double header its an issue which maybe takes on greater significance. There's a reason why both Saints and the black and whites looked a bit leggy on Friday night. FC have to go again on Thursday, although fortunately for them they face Widnes. Meanwhile a nine-day break should be enough for Saints to recover from their Easter eggs-ertions (yes I just did that) and look to strengthen their grip on Super League's top spot.
In the lead-up to this one I happened to catch wannabe shock-jock and Hull FC fan Adrian Durham gloating about the absence of Ben Barba from the Saints line-up. Barba missed out through illness prompting Durham to declare himself 'very, very happy' at what he saw as an opportunity for his black and whites. But what he and many others had failed to take into account was the fact that Saints had an England international waiting to step in.
Jonny Lomax stepped seamlessly into his pre-Barba role. Safe under the high ball and with the ability to join up with the attack, Lomax claimed 131 metres on 18 carries and assisted Mark Percival's crucial try early in the second half which came after a neat move from a scrum. That gave Saints some much needed breathing space after a tight first 40 in which Zeb Taia's converted try was the only score.
Any team would miss a player of the class of Barba. He has 10 tries to his name already this season and has been at the heart of pretty much everything Saints have done in both attack and defence in the early part of 2018. It was noticable that Saints lacked a little bit of direction in the FC 20-metre zone in an error filled first half but it was encouraging to see Saints fix that up after half-time, with Lomax central to that. This is far from a one man team. Though without Barba it is essentially the same team which was struggling under Keiron Cunningham this time last year, it is difficult to think of too many players who haven't improved under the tutelage of Justin Holbrook. Fans of other clubs would no doubt rather their team face Saints without Barba than with him but they should not get too excited if they don't see the Australian fullback's name on the teamsheet.
But will the squad be tested?
Barba isn't the only man that Saints have to worry about doing without. Alex Walmsley has been ruled out for the long term with a fractured bone in his neck and though no time frame has been set for his return it will be a surprise if Engy the England prop sees action again in 2018. Adam Swift is midway through what was predicted to be a six-week lay-off with a shoulder injury which is doing more to keep Regan Grace in the team than anything the Welshman has mustered in recent weeks. While these absences hardly constitute an injury crisis of 2014 proportions they do indicate that the squad is about to be tested. Four years ago Saints came up with the revolutionary strategy of winning the League Leaders Shield and the Grand Final with Johnny Vegas and Stan Wall in the halves, but this vintage faces some different challenges.
With Barba expected back the key concern ahead of the weekend visit to Wakefield Trinity surrounds James Roby. The skipper left this one early in the second half with a rib injury, with Holbrook calling it 'a big ask' to expect Roby to be fit for the trip east. Where Barba was replaced by another fullback of international pedigree in Lomax, Roby's place will likely go to the previously ostracised Matty Smith. The man who would take us to the Promised Land as a scrum half does not lack the work rate or the tactical nous to do the job, but the bold truth is that he is not a natural hooker. Even if he were he could not hope to compensate for Roby's absence. There isn't another hooker in Super League who could come into a side and play at Roby's level, so to expect a part-timer like Smith to do so is as fanciful as expecting him to take us to the Promised Land as a 7. Theo Fages may also see some action in the role although he has recently been needed at stand-off in the absence of Lomax at Widnes and Barba here. Holbrook has options but you wouldn't like to find out what would happen if we lost one of two more.
THAT forward pass.
Despite it having about as much influence on the result as a running track at West Ham social media has been alight with fury at the award of Hull's first try scored by Albert Kelly. Holbrook had identified the stand-off as one of the main threats pre-game but even he couldn't have envisaged that Kelly would do it disguised as a wide receiver. The pass he collected from Jack Logan before scooting away to score was so far forward it might have qualified Logan for the javelin final at the Commonwealth Games. Yet neither referee Robert Hicks nor his touch judge on the south side of the ground spotted it. Everyone else did, including Wigan cheerleader and self parody Phil Clarke who could only offer Barba's super slo-mo knock on at Widnes on Easter Monday as justification. The largest endorsement of two wrongs equalling a right since Theresa May actually listened to the Amsterdam bridge beer-chuckers and went through with Brexit.
It all begs the question why we cannot use the video evidence to rule on forward passes. Especially since the notion that it all evens itself out over a season is the kind of total bollocks reserved only for those who have recently benefitted from an incompetent decision by a referee. We review everything else, to the point now where players are being yellow carded several hours after an infringement, yet we steadfastly cling on to the idea that 21st century camera technology cannot shed light on whether a pass has left the hands and then travelled in a forward direction. Even the buffoons in rugby union, who seem to do everything later than we do with the exception of organising credible international competition, have cottoned on to the idea that replays are helpful in this regard. It may not have mattered here but a gross error such as this could really cost somebody. If we have to have the annoyance of the video referee at all then ruling on forward passes should be included as a matter of urgency. Otherwise let's just get rid of it altogether and take our chances.
The re-enforcements step up
If I'm honest with you I've spent an awful lot of time since the Warrington win fretting about what this column has previously declared a lack of quality at prop in the absence of Walmsley. I've done this partly because it distracts me from anything approaching a real problem, but partly because the back-ups are Kyle Amor, Luke Douglas and Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook. Disappointingly we have yet to see Matty Lees since Walmsley's injury.
Yet perhaps I fretted too soon. All of that trio of Amor, Douglas and McCarthy-Scarsbrook have been excellent over the Easter period and all upped their game again in this one. All three broke the 100 metre barrier that simplistic chancers like me consider a minimum for front rowers. With Luke Thompson following suit and now looked upon as something of a leader by example in that group suddenly the void left by Walmsley, while still fairly sizeable, is not one that looks impossible to fill. If the support cast can add consistency to their performance a run of form that has seen Saints win nine of their first 10 Super League games could continue into the second half of the regular season.
Time for a breather
On which subject Saints next assignment sees them go to the laughably named Mobile Rocket Stadium to face Chris Chester's Wakefield Trinity on Sunday (April 15). Ordinarily in action on Fridays, that extra 48 hours preparation is very welcome after an Easter programme that has taken in three games in the space of eight days for Saints and Hull.
Too much is perhaps made of the time clubs have between games. Who isn't tired of seeing Denis Betts or Steve McNamara bang on about 'short turnarounds' after their latest defeat? But following a double header its an issue which maybe takes on greater significance. There's a reason why both Saints and the black and whites looked a bit leggy on Friday night. FC have to go again on Thursday, although fortunately for them they face Widnes. Meanwhile a nine-day break should be enough for Saints to recover from their Easter eggs-ertions (yes I just did that) and look to strengthen their grip on Super League's top spot.
Thursday, 5 April 2018
Saints v Hull FC Preview
Table topping, Wigan slaying bundle of positivity Saints face their third league game in eight days when they host Hull FC in a BetFred Super League Round 10 meeting on Friday night (April 6, kick-off 7.45pm).
It was a highly successful Easter for Justin Holbrook's side who edged a thrilling derby 21-18 over Wigan on Good Friday before cruising to a 28-6 win at Widnes on Easter Monday. The double left Saints four points clear at the top of the table and looking like the team to beat in the race to Old Trafford in 2018.
The holiday brought happiness for Hull FC too. After a wobble following their Wigan-inspired trip to Australia the black and whites have won their last three in the league. Their Easter featured a 30-22 win over neighbours Hull KR, achieved despite playing with 12 men for 70 minutes, and a nerve-jangling 27-26 win over Wakefield Trinity thanks to Marc Sneyd's ridiculous 50-metre drop-goal in the last minute. Lee Radford's side are up to fifth and a win in this one will draw them to within four points of Saints.
To achieve that they'll need to get past a very similar set of personnel to that which saw off Wigan and Widnes. Holbrook has again named the same 19-man squad for the match as he did ahead of the Easter fixtures. The only change to the 17 is likely to be the re-introduction of Jonny Lomax, rested for the trip to Widnes. Matty Smith looks the likeliest to miss out in that case after making his first appearance of the season on Monday. That would mean Lomax probably slotting back in at stand-off with Theo Fages returning to a bench role. With Adam Swift still out injured the rest of the back line should be as you were with Ben Barba lighting cigars at fullback behind wingers Regan Grace and Tommy Makinson. Mark Percival and Ryan Morgan should continue at centre with Danny Richardson at scrum-half.
Alex Walmsley remains the big miss in the pack. The only question is whether his long term neck injury will finally afford Matty Lees a chance or whether Holbrook will stick with the front rowers who have upped their game since Walmsley's injury. Luke Douglas rightly avoided suspension following his sin-binning at Widnes and will look to feature alongside Kyle Amor, Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook and the standout Luke Thompson. Crafty Cockney Louie looks set to make his 300th appearance in Super League including his time at London Broncos. James Roby needs one try to match Tommy Makinson's milestone of 100 for the club and leads the side at hooker. Zeb Taia, Dominique Peyroux, Jon Wilkin and Morgan Knowles will be the back row options.
Hull are without Dean Hadley and Jordan Abdull but welcome back all of Jamie Shaul, Carlos Tuimavave and, crucially, Danny Houghton after they along with the also recalled Jordan Lane missed the win over Wakefield. Fetuli Talanoa is Super League's top try scorer with 11, one more than both Barba and Percival. Yet it is stand-off Albert Kelly who Holbrook has identified as a major threat. His speed and craft compliments Sneyd's kicking game in the halves and ensures that men like Talanoa, Tuimavave and Josh Griffin get the service they need.
Houghton is the key in the pack but Radford will hope Sika Manu is able to return after four games out. Mark Minichiello is ageing but genuine Super League quality and with England squad member Scott Taylor in the ranks along with Josh Bowden and Chris Green FC have the grunt up front to trouble a Saints side trying to fill the Walmsley-sized hole in their side.
The match is the first leg of the Steve Prescott Cup, played for between these two former clubs of the much loved international fullback and charity champion. The winner will be decided on aggregate score over the two regular season meetings between the two, with Saints currently the holders thanks largely to their 45-0 walloping of FC at the 2017 Magic Weekend.
In form Saints should be genuinely tested by an improving Hull side but should be confident about making it nine wins out of 10 to start their 2018 campaign.
Squads;
St Helens;
1. Jonny Lomax 2. Tommy Makinson 3. Ryan Morgan 4. Mark Percival 6. Theo Fages 7. Matty Smith 9. James Roby 10. Kyle Amor 11. Zeb Taia 12. Jon Wilkin 13. Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook 14. Luke Douglas 15. Morgan Knowles 16. Luke Thompson 17. Dominique Peyroux 18. Danny Richardson 19. Regan Grace 20. Matty Lees 23. Ben Barba
Hull FC;
1. Jamie Shaul 3. Carlos Tuimavave 4. Josh Griffin 5. Fetuli Talanoa 6. Albert Kelly 7. Marc Sneyd 8. Scott Taylor 9. Danny Houghton 12. Mark Minichiello 13. Josh Bowden 14. Jake Connor 15. Chris Green 17. Danny Washbrook 20. Brad Fash 21. Sika Manu 22. Jez Litten 23. Mickey Paea 24. Jack Logan 26. Jordan Lane
Referee: Robert Hicks
It was a highly successful Easter for Justin Holbrook's side who edged a thrilling derby 21-18 over Wigan on Good Friday before cruising to a 28-6 win at Widnes on Easter Monday. The double left Saints four points clear at the top of the table and looking like the team to beat in the race to Old Trafford in 2018.
The holiday brought happiness for Hull FC too. After a wobble following their Wigan-inspired trip to Australia the black and whites have won their last three in the league. Their Easter featured a 30-22 win over neighbours Hull KR, achieved despite playing with 12 men for 70 minutes, and a nerve-jangling 27-26 win over Wakefield Trinity thanks to Marc Sneyd's ridiculous 50-metre drop-goal in the last minute. Lee Radford's side are up to fifth and a win in this one will draw them to within four points of Saints.
To achieve that they'll need to get past a very similar set of personnel to that which saw off Wigan and Widnes. Holbrook has again named the same 19-man squad for the match as he did ahead of the Easter fixtures. The only change to the 17 is likely to be the re-introduction of Jonny Lomax, rested for the trip to Widnes. Matty Smith looks the likeliest to miss out in that case after making his first appearance of the season on Monday. That would mean Lomax probably slotting back in at stand-off with Theo Fages returning to a bench role. With Adam Swift still out injured the rest of the back line should be as you were with Ben Barba lighting cigars at fullback behind wingers Regan Grace and Tommy Makinson. Mark Percival and Ryan Morgan should continue at centre with Danny Richardson at scrum-half.
Alex Walmsley remains the big miss in the pack. The only question is whether his long term neck injury will finally afford Matty Lees a chance or whether Holbrook will stick with the front rowers who have upped their game since Walmsley's injury. Luke Douglas rightly avoided suspension following his sin-binning at Widnes and will look to feature alongside Kyle Amor, Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook and the standout Luke Thompson. Crafty Cockney Louie looks set to make his 300th appearance in Super League including his time at London Broncos. James Roby needs one try to match Tommy Makinson's milestone of 100 for the club and leads the side at hooker. Zeb Taia, Dominique Peyroux, Jon Wilkin and Morgan Knowles will be the back row options.
Hull are without Dean Hadley and Jordan Abdull but welcome back all of Jamie Shaul, Carlos Tuimavave and, crucially, Danny Houghton after they along with the also recalled Jordan Lane missed the win over Wakefield. Fetuli Talanoa is Super League's top try scorer with 11, one more than both Barba and Percival. Yet it is stand-off Albert Kelly who Holbrook has identified as a major threat. His speed and craft compliments Sneyd's kicking game in the halves and ensures that men like Talanoa, Tuimavave and Josh Griffin get the service they need.
Houghton is the key in the pack but Radford will hope Sika Manu is able to return after four games out. Mark Minichiello is ageing but genuine Super League quality and with England squad member Scott Taylor in the ranks along with Josh Bowden and Chris Green FC have the grunt up front to trouble a Saints side trying to fill the Walmsley-sized hole in their side.
The match is the first leg of the Steve Prescott Cup, played for between these two former clubs of the much loved international fullback and charity champion. The winner will be decided on aggregate score over the two regular season meetings between the two, with Saints currently the holders thanks largely to their 45-0 walloping of FC at the 2017 Magic Weekend.
In form Saints should be genuinely tested by an improving Hull side but should be confident about making it nine wins out of 10 to start their 2018 campaign.
Squads;
St Helens;
1. Jonny Lomax 2. Tommy Makinson 3. Ryan Morgan 4. Mark Percival 6. Theo Fages 7. Matty Smith 9. James Roby 10. Kyle Amor 11. Zeb Taia 12. Jon Wilkin 13. Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook 14. Luke Douglas 15. Morgan Knowles 16. Luke Thompson 17. Dominique Peyroux 18. Danny Richardson 19. Regan Grace 20. Matty Lees 23. Ben Barba
Hull FC;
1. Jamie Shaul 3. Carlos Tuimavave 4. Josh Griffin 5. Fetuli Talanoa 6. Albert Kelly 7. Marc Sneyd 8. Scott Taylor 9. Danny Houghton 12. Mark Minichiello 13. Josh Bowden 14. Jake Connor 15. Chris Green 17. Danny Washbrook 20. Brad Fash 21. Sika Manu 22. Jez Litten 23. Mickey Paea 24. Jack Logan 26. Jordan Lane
Referee: Robert Hicks
Tuesday, 3 April 2018
5 Talking Points From Widnes 6 Saints 28
Ton up Tommy
While England's batsmen waft away helplessly in New Zealand there is at least one Englishman besides Jonny Bairstow celebrating a century this Easter. Tommy Makinson's double against Widnes brought up 100 tries for Saints for the 26-year-old since his debut in 2011 and reminded us all that when given the opportunity, Makinson is one of the best finishers in the game.
In many ways Makinson has been a victim of his own versatility. Pre-Ben Barba he stood in for Jonny Lomax at fullback at times and did so expertly, while recently he had been operating at centre as a consequence of Ryan Morgan's absence and coach Justin Holbrook's seeming unwillingness to choose between Regan Grace and Adam Swift on the left wing. But with Swift out Morgan has been restored over the holiday double-header allowing Makinson to revert to the right wing position where he made his name. It remains his best position, illustrated by two trademark athletic finishes and by 141 metres on 19 carries. His kick returning and composure under the high ball have been outstanding. It isn't that Makinson has been doing a bad job in the centres. Far from it. But his move back to the wing has brought better balance to the Saints in both attack and defence. If he gets a run of games there when Swift returns and isn't sacrificed for the team, look for Makinson to add to the three Super League tries he has scored in 2018. Beyond that? Here's to the next 100.
Douglas unlucky to see yellow.
Depleted Widnes were missing 11 of their first team squad and were so bad that they even managed to concede a try with a man advantage. There might be a debate to be had about whether the absence of Luke Douglas for 10 minutes makes Saints any weaker, but the Scotland man can consider himself a little unfortunate to have been sent for a sit down by referee Chris Kendall.
Douglas saw yellow early in the second half for a dangerous 'crusher' tackle on Widnes fullback Danny Craven. Yet in making the challenge along with Morgan Knowles Douglas had almost no control over the pressure applied to Craven's neck. Much of it came about because of the extra weight added to the tackle by the Welshman. There are issues around player safety to consider and there is an argument that players have a duty of care to each other. Yet when there is so little intention, and so little opportunity to avoid placing an opponent in a dangerous position then offenders can consider themselves unfortunate to be punished with anything more than a penalty. The disciplinary body's ruling that no further action is necessary seems to suggest that they have some sympathy with Douglas also.
Kendall not to blame for Barba error
Kendall took a suspiciously long time to decide to use the sin-bin following the Douglas incident, with video evidence provided by the controversy-obsessed broadcaster almost certainly a factor. But the referee was quick to award Barba his 10th try of the season despite the fact that the 625th replay, slowed down to within an inch of its life, seemed to prove that there was a miniscule moment of separation between Barba's hand and the ball as he reached out to ground it.
Multiple replays at full speed offered no evidence of this, and indeed several other freeze-frame angles seemed to show that the fullback had a fingertip on the ball as it hit the ground. Unless we go down the NFL route of reviewing all scoring plays then it is virtually impossible to eradicate these errors. If the pictures have to be slowed down to that extent to pick up the separation is it even desirable to have tries disallowed on that basis? Shouldn't the video referee, if we have to have one at all, be there to clear up the glaring mistakes by officials and not to try to reach the unattainable goal of getting everything 100% right? Maybe that's easy for us to say since we were the beneficiaries on this occasion but Kendall should certainly be absolved of any blame for failing to have a doubt in his mind. in real time, there wasn't any.
Is Smith a genuine option or an Easter stop-gap?
Jonny Lomax was rested for this one as Matty Smith came into the 17 for the first time this season. However, when Smith entered the fray in the second half it was not in the halves in place of either Danny Richardson or Theo Fages but at hooker in place of James Roby.
Smith's stats suggest he did a reasonable job even if some of his distribution from dummy half had eerie echoes of Tommy Lee. Smith ran just once from dummy half for 13 metres but put in 18 tackles, three from marker. Against the lesser sides or in games when Saints have carved out a comfortable lead Smith may be a viable option if we want to give Roby a break.
But is there another agenda? Post-game Holbrook was complimentary about not only Smith's performance but also about his attitude to being left out for so long and his willingness to help his team-mates in any way he can. But Holbrook also acknowledged Smith's frustration at his lack of playing time and that it may be difficult to keep him at the club in those circumstances. Hull KR, Salford and Catalans have all been linked with a loan move for Smith who would almost certainly start for any of those teams.
Optimists will suggest that getting Smith off the wage bill will open up cap space to sign a prop to cover for long term injury victim Alex Walmsley. But in truth all the funds in the world will not magically fashion an available front-rower with anything like the same effectiveness as Walmsley. Saints might be better served holding on to Smith if possible. But that is an 'if'. Smith may not want to stick around if Lomax's return makes his appearance here a one-off, holiday stop-gap.
Fages fails to take his chance
Saints barely got out of second gear here. That's handy given that this one was sandwiched between two massive home games against Wigan and Hull FC. But for Theo Fages his and the team's inability to reach maximum performance levels will be a disappointment.
Fages was offered a first start of the season with Lomax rested. Not only that but the Frenchman got to play at stand-off, a refreshing change from being used as a quasi-13 late in games as we have previously seen him. Conditions were not the best anywhere this weekend for open, flowing rugby but Fages made a couple of pretty basic handling errors and poor decisions. With Barba in the ranks there is a tendancy for our stand-off to be on the periphary a little more now but you might still expect more from a player who should have been desperate to make a big impression. But maybe that's Theo, not wanting to do too much by himself particularly with Holbrook's recent criticism of Jon Wilkin. Whether it was selflessness or sloppiness from Fages it could cost him.
While England's batsmen waft away helplessly in New Zealand there is at least one Englishman besides Jonny Bairstow celebrating a century this Easter. Tommy Makinson's double against Widnes brought up 100 tries for Saints for the 26-year-old since his debut in 2011 and reminded us all that when given the opportunity, Makinson is one of the best finishers in the game.
In many ways Makinson has been a victim of his own versatility. Pre-Ben Barba he stood in for Jonny Lomax at fullback at times and did so expertly, while recently he had been operating at centre as a consequence of Ryan Morgan's absence and coach Justin Holbrook's seeming unwillingness to choose between Regan Grace and Adam Swift on the left wing. But with Swift out Morgan has been restored over the holiday double-header allowing Makinson to revert to the right wing position where he made his name. It remains his best position, illustrated by two trademark athletic finishes and by 141 metres on 19 carries. His kick returning and composure under the high ball have been outstanding. It isn't that Makinson has been doing a bad job in the centres. Far from it. But his move back to the wing has brought better balance to the Saints in both attack and defence. If he gets a run of games there when Swift returns and isn't sacrificed for the team, look for Makinson to add to the three Super League tries he has scored in 2018. Beyond that? Here's to the next 100.
Douglas unlucky to see yellow.
Depleted Widnes were missing 11 of their first team squad and were so bad that they even managed to concede a try with a man advantage. There might be a debate to be had about whether the absence of Luke Douglas for 10 minutes makes Saints any weaker, but the Scotland man can consider himself a little unfortunate to have been sent for a sit down by referee Chris Kendall.
Douglas saw yellow early in the second half for a dangerous 'crusher' tackle on Widnes fullback Danny Craven. Yet in making the challenge along with Morgan Knowles Douglas had almost no control over the pressure applied to Craven's neck. Much of it came about because of the extra weight added to the tackle by the Welshman. There are issues around player safety to consider and there is an argument that players have a duty of care to each other. Yet when there is so little intention, and so little opportunity to avoid placing an opponent in a dangerous position then offenders can consider themselves unfortunate to be punished with anything more than a penalty. The disciplinary body's ruling that no further action is necessary seems to suggest that they have some sympathy with Douglas also.
Kendall not to blame for Barba error
Kendall took a suspiciously long time to decide to use the sin-bin following the Douglas incident, with video evidence provided by the controversy-obsessed broadcaster almost certainly a factor. But the referee was quick to award Barba his 10th try of the season despite the fact that the 625th replay, slowed down to within an inch of its life, seemed to prove that there was a miniscule moment of separation between Barba's hand and the ball as he reached out to ground it.
Multiple replays at full speed offered no evidence of this, and indeed several other freeze-frame angles seemed to show that the fullback had a fingertip on the ball as it hit the ground. Unless we go down the NFL route of reviewing all scoring plays then it is virtually impossible to eradicate these errors. If the pictures have to be slowed down to that extent to pick up the separation is it even desirable to have tries disallowed on that basis? Shouldn't the video referee, if we have to have one at all, be there to clear up the glaring mistakes by officials and not to try to reach the unattainable goal of getting everything 100% right? Maybe that's easy for us to say since we were the beneficiaries on this occasion but Kendall should certainly be absolved of any blame for failing to have a doubt in his mind. in real time, there wasn't any.
Is Smith a genuine option or an Easter stop-gap?
Jonny Lomax was rested for this one as Matty Smith came into the 17 for the first time this season. However, when Smith entered the fray in the second half it was not in the halves in place of either Danny Richardson or Theo Fages but at hooker in place of James Roby.
Smith's stats suggest he did a reasonable job even if some of his distribution from dummy half had eerie echoes of Tommy Lee. Smith ran just once from dummy half for 13 metres but put in 18 tackles, three from marker. Against the lesser sides or in games when Saints have carved out a comfortable lead Smith may be a viable option if we want to give Roby a break.
But is there another agenda? Post-game Holbrook was complimentary about not only Smith's performance but also about his attitude to being left out for so long and his willingness to help his team-mates in any way he can. But Holbrook also acknowledged Smith's frustration at his lack of playing time and that it may be difficult to keep him at the club in those circumstances. Hull KR, Salford and Catalans have all been linked with a loan move for Smith who would almost certainly start for any of those teams.
Optimists will suggest that getting Smith off the wage bill will open up cap space to sign a prop to cover for long term injury victim Alex Walmsley. But in truth all the funds in the world will not magically fashion an available front-rower with anything like the same effectiveness as Walmsley. Saints might be better served holding on to Smith if possible. But that is an 'if'. Smith may not want to stick around if Lomax's return makes his appearance here a one-off, holiday stop-gap.
Fages fails to take his chance
Saints barely got out of second gear here. That's handy given that this one was sandwiched between two massive home games against Wigan and Hull FC. But for Theo Fages his and the team's inability to reach maximum performance levels will be a disappointment.
Fages was offered a first start of the season with Lomax rested. Not only that but the Frenchman got to play at stand-off, a refreshing change from being used as a quasi-13 late in games as we have previously seen him. Conditions were not the best anywhere this weekend for open, flowing rugby but Fages made a couple of pretty basic handling errors and poor decisions. With Barba in the ranks there is a tendancy for our stand-off to be on the periphary a little more now but you might still expect more from a player who should have been desperate to make a big impression. But maybe that's Theo, not wanting to do too much by himself particularly with Holbrook's recent criticism of Jon Wilkin. Whether it was selflessness or sloppiness from Fages it could cost him.
Monday, 2 April 2018
Widnes Vikings v Saints Preview
Saints attempt to make it a very happy Easter when they visit Widnes Vikings in a BetFred Super League Round 9 match-up on Monday (April 9, kick-off 3.05pm).
Justin Holbrook's side vanquished the Evil Empire on Good Friday (March 30) with a heart-stopping 21-18 win sealed by Regan Grace's late try and Danny Richardson's nerveless touchline conversion and drop-goal. But all of that would be considerably less glorious should Saints fail to see off a Widnes side that has not inspired so far in 2018. The Vikings come in off the back of a derby defeat, going down 32-18 to a Warrington side for whom Josh Charnley scored two tries on debut. It was a fifth loss in eight league outings so far for Dennis Betts' side who currently occupy the final top eight berth.
With last season's visit to Widnes in mind there was an expectation that Holbrook would make a few changes to his squad, especially with such a short space of time between the two Easter fixtures. Tommy Makinson was not risked on Widnes' 4G pitch last year which led to a rather fraught appearance for Ricky Bailey, but Makinson is potentially available as Holbrook makes no changes to the 19-man party that took on Wigan. That means only Alex Walmsley and Adam Swift, out with neck and shoulder injuries respectively, are missing from what you might consider Saints strongest available squad.
None of which means Makinson is guaranteed to play. Holbrook can choose to draft in players from outside the 19 if there are medical grounds to do so. We saw Wigan coach do exactly that on Friday when the previously unnamed Morgan Escare came in as a late replacement for the ill Sam Tomkins. But even if Holbrook decides to stick with what he has there is some scope for changes to the match day 17. There has been talk of a first appearance of the season for Matty Smith which could mean a rest for Jonny Lomax ahead of the visit of Hull FC on Friday (April 6). With Swift out resting Makinson is more complex. A reshuffling of the back line would be required with perhaps Ryan Morgan operating on the wing and maybe a return to the centres for Dominique Peyroux.
Ben Barba is another who looked bruised and battered during the derby and is another candidate for a nice long sit down, although since Lomax and Makinson are the only likely candidates to step in at fullback and are themselves arguably in need of a bit of protection Barba may have to soldier on. As will Mark Percival and Grace.
If Smith does play there is still a decision to be made about who partners him in the halves. Holbrook publicly stated before the start of the season that he saw Richardson as more of a stand-off than a scrum half and the coach may take the opportunity to test that theory. Or, assuming that he doesn't stick with Lomax, Holbrook may offer an opportunity to Theo Fages. The Frenchman is probably most comfortable at 6 but has so far only seen action as a tackling machine at loose forward off the bench in 2018. This could be his chance to shine.
With Walmsley out the options are less complex in the pack. Ideally some may favour finding a way to rest James Roby and Fages offers Holbrook that option. But one of the reasons given for appointing Roby as captain was that he was a player that Holbrook wanted the England hooker on the field as much as possible. Roby was certainly influential in the win over Wigan and it may be best to leave well enough alone. Prop duties were carried out by the excellent Luke Thompson as well as Kyle Amor, Luke Douglas and Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook on Friday but this one perhaps will see one of those rested to give Matty Lees an opportunity. Zeb Taia, Jon Wilkin and Morgan Knowles offer back row options alongside Peyroux provided he isn't moved to the centres. In many ways it would be a shame to move him out of the second row given the improvement in his performances since Holbrook's arrival.
Betts makes four changes to his squad with the eye-catching absentees being fullback Rhys Hanbury, form centre Krisnan Inu and back rower Chris Houston. Gil Dudson also misses out as Alex Gerrard, Danny Craven, Danny Walker and Wellington Albert all come in. Hanbury hasn't been at his best but leaves a gaping hole at the back for the Vikings while Inu is the club's leading try-scorer with six so far this term. Only Barba, Percival and Fetuli Talanoa of Hull FC have more in Super League so far. Charly Runciman and Stefan Marsh are among those expected to pick up the slack with Joe Mellor and Tom Gilmore operating in the creative department in midfield. Up front Gerrard's return is a boost while MacGraff Leuluai, Aaron Heremaia, Chris Dean and Tom Olbison have much needed experience.
Saints last visit to Widnes ended in a surprise 16-14 defeat, a game which followed the Easter double header and proved a step too far for Saints whose much changed side could not repeat the heroics of an equally surprising Easter Monday win over Castleford. Yet with this year's vintage currently four points clear at the top there should be a greater determination to not get caught short this time at what looks like a fairly mediocre Widnes outfit.
Squads;
Widnes Vikings;
2. Stefan Marsh 4. Charly Runciman 6. Joe Mellor 7. Tom Gilmore 10. Alex Gerrard 14. Chris Dean 15. Danny Craven 16. Tom Olbison 17. Sam Wilde 19. Greg Burke 20. MacGraff Leuluai 21. Jordan Johnstone 22. Ryan Ince 23. Danny Walker 24. Ed Chamberlain 26 Ed Chapelhow 28. Bradley Walker 30. Keanen Brand 36. Wellington Albert
St Helens;
1. Jonny Lomax 2. Tommy Makinson 3. Ryan Morgan 4. Mark Percival 6. Theo Fages 7. Matty Smith 9. James Roby 10. Kyle Amor 11. Zeb Taia 12. Jon Wilkin 13. Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook 14. Luke Douglas 15. Morgan Knowles 16. Luke Thompson 17. Dominique Peyroux 18. Danny Richardson 19. Regan Grace 20. Matty Lees 23. Ben Barba
Referee: Chris Kendall
Justin Holbrook's side vanquished the Evil Empire on Good Friday (March 30) with a heart-stopping 21-18 win sealed by Regan Grace's late try and Danny Richardson's nerveless touchline conversion and drop-goal. But all of that would be considerably less glorious should Saints fail to see off a Widnes side that has not inspired so far in 2018. The Vikings come in off the back of a derby defeat, going down 32-18 to a Warrington side for whom Josh Charnley scored two tries on debut. It was a fifth loss in eight league outings so far for Dennis Betts' side who currently occupy the final top eight berth.
With last season's visit to Widnes in mind there was an expectation that Holbrook would make a few changes to his squad, especially with such a short space of time between the two Easter fixtures. Tommy Makinson was not risked on Widnes' 4G pitch last year which led to a rather fraught appearance for Ricky Bailey, but Makinson is potentially available as Holbrook makes no changes to the 19-man party that took on Wigan. That means only Alex Walmsley and Adam Swift, out with neck and shoulder injuries respectively, are missing from what you might consider Saints strongest available squad.
None of which means Makinson is guaranteed to play. Holbrook can choose to draft in players from outside the 19 if there are medical grounds to do so. We saw Wigan coach do exactly that on Friday when the previously unnamed Morgan Escare came in as a late replacement for the ill Sam Tomkins. But even if Holbrook decides to stick with what he has there is some scope for changes to the match day 17. There has been talk of a first appearance of the season for Matty Smith which could mean a rest for Jonny Lomax ahead of the visit of Hull FC on Friday (April 6). With Swift out resting Makinson is more complex. A reshuffling of the back line would be required with perhaps Ryan Morgan operating on the wing and maybe a return to the centres for Dominique Peyroux.
Ben Barba is another who looked bruised and battered during the derby and is another candidate for a nice long sit down, although since Lomax and Makinson are the only likely candidates to step in at fullback and are themselves arguably in need of a bit of protection Barba may have to soldier on. As will Mark Percival and Grace.
If Smith does play there is still a decision to be made about who partners him in the halves. Holbrook publicly stated before the start of the season that he saw Richardson as more of a stand-off than a scrum half and the coach may take the opportunity to test that theory. Or, assuming that he doesn't stick with Lomax, Holbrook may offer an opportunity to Theo Fages. The Frenchman is probably most comfortable at 6 but has so far only seen action as a tackling machine at loose forward off the bench in 2018. This could be his chance to shine.
With Walmsley out the options are less complex in the pack. Ideally some may favour finding a way to rest James Roby and Fages offers Holbrook that option. But one of the reasons given for appointing Roby as captain was that he was a player that Holbrook wanted the England hooker on the field as much as possible. Roby was certainly influential in the win over Wigan and it may be best to leave well enough alone. Prop duties were carried out by the excellent Luke Thompson as well as Kyle Amor, Luke Douglas and Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook on Friday but this one perhaps will see one of those rested to give Matty Lees an opportunity. Zeb Taia, Jon Wilkin and Morgan Knowles offer back row options alongside Peyroux provided he isn't moved to the centres. In many ways it would be a shame to move him out of the second row given the improvement in his performances since Holbrook's arrival.
Betts makes four changes to his squad with the eye-catching absentees being fullback Rhys Hanbury, form centre Krisnan Inu and back rower Chris Houston. Gil Dudson also misses out as Alex Gerrard, Danny Craven, Danny Walker and Wellington Albert all come in. Hanbury hasn't been at his best but leaves a gaping hole at the back for the Vikings while Inu is the club's leading try-scorer with six so far this term. Only Barba, Percival and Fetuli Talanoa of Hull FC have more in Super League so far. Charly Runciman and Stefan Marsh are among those expected to pick up the slack with Joe Mellor and Tom Gilmore operating in the creative department in midfield. Up front Gerrard's return is a boost while MacGraff Leuluai, Aaron Heremaia, Chris Dean and Tom Olbison have much needed experience.
Saints last visit to Widnes ended in a surprise 16-14 defeat, a game which followed the Easter double header and proved a step too far for Saints whose much changed side could not repeat the heroics of an equally surprising Easter Monday win over Castleford. Yet with this year's vintage currently four points clear at the top there should be a greater determination to not get caught short this time at what looks like a fairly mediocre Widnes outfit.
Squads;
Widnes Vikings;
2. Stefan Marsh 4. Charly Runciman 6. Joe Mellor 7. Tom Gilmore 10. Alex Gerrard 14. Chris Dean 15. Danny Craven 16. Tom Olbison 17. Sam Wilde 19. Greg Burke 20. MacGraff Leuluai 21. Jordan Johnstone 22. Ryan Ince 23. Danny Walker 24. Ed Chamberlain 26 Ed Chapelhow 28. Bradley Walker 30. Keanen Brand 36. Wellington Albert
St Helens;
1. Jonny Lomax 2. Tommy Makinson 3. Ryan Morgan 4. Mark Percival 6. Theo Fages 7. Matty Smith 9. James Roby 10. Kyle Amor 11. Zeb Taia 12. Jon Wilkin 13. Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook 14. Luke Douglas 15. Morgan Knowles 16. Luke Thompson 17. Dominique Peyroux 18. Danny Richardson 19. Regan Grace 20. Matty Lees 23. Ben Barba
Referee: Chris Kendall
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