A tremendous and sensible post with plenty of positivity about Saints and the game in general. Not something we're used to from your Wigan brethren in fairness! Here's to a classic match tonight.

I was with you until that bit, you're no Wigan fan....

The thing that emphasised sky's position for me was the following quote:

'It wasn't the best little kick but does Duport get a finger tip to it? Yeah he does...sadly.'

That was said by Stevo on 53 minutes when the game was still in the balance, completely unprofessional from a 'neutral' commentator.

I know what you mean, because some of his (their) comments in the past about us have made me think the same way, but I think most of the time it’s because they just want the games to be close, cliff-hangers, to better the Sky event sort of thing. I’m sure he knew as did most of us that Saints should be likely winners and he didn’t want the game to drift into a non-event, so I wouldn’t take his comments too much to heart, I do!

It's not about taking comments to heart. I rarely do.

I was just pointing out that Sky seem to have set their stall out early. It's news -corporation tactics to see who will win a general election and when it's pretty certain they will plow in all guns blazing and claim the victory was all down to them.

Well last night I felt it went beyond routing for the underdog. I don't expect balance, the piece on Roby at the start seemed to be someone at Sky saying erm the OPTA stats are out boys and erm well Roby has trounced them, so we best do a focus piece. So that was unbalanced in our favour you could say. But things like wanting to get Lance banned for next week, Sia banned for next week, totally missing the punch from Elima but then showing his shirt being held, it was just more than I have seen, I would have expected the GF to be something of a band wagonathon.

Saints fans are clear that player wise we are up against it and we need to be at our best and rely on defense and something of attrition to wear down the other side.

I've chilled a bit now, but last night I was absolutely steaming, even the swift try, which was pretty good, by anyones standard only seemed to be referanced by how lucky we were not to be in touch. Rather than the strength, speed and skill needed to work in such a finiate amount of space.

Any way. All that aside. What I would have expected was us to get it in the neck for letting the pressure off at key moments in that game. There were times again last night were we demonstrated that to play without halves means any error, dropped/sloppy play the ball, leaving gaps in defense get punished even more severely.

I was not over joyed with our performance in the first 20. There were times when we just did not seem up to speed. Whether that was the week off or what I am not sure. But the incident with Mose passing back the ball to Lance who was busy having a chat or something made me almost launch something at the TV. We just did not seem 100% there. But then after the break the sloppy stuff seemed to drift out of the game for a bit.

I'll be at the final next week as it's not yet been move to a Thursday (really don't like Thursday matches now).
So thankfully I'll be able just put up with the ribbing from the opposition.

The Mose pass to Lance who wasn't watching summed up Lances time with us imo, full of "if only"

I do feel we had another gear in us last night that we did not or could not use. There were times when our forwards were brushing off theirs with ease but we never seemed to kick on from that and build pressure, the kicking game was poor, especially compared to the Cas game, but, and this is the most important bit, we did what needed to be done and no more.

So many times in the recent past we absolutely blitzed semi finals only to come up short on the big stage. I'm hoping we tried to reverse that.

Just watched SL fulltime. Clarke is amazing. Shows a punch in the face and totally misses it.

Was there any time given to "Sam" yes Tompkins when he was being interviewed by sky in "church square today" a mate of mine reckons he was there ????????.

I actually believe Sky want us to win. They're purposely putting all the pressure on Wigan and degrading us to rile us up so that we go out there and win. At the end of the day i'd rather them be saying this about us because if we lose then that's what they expected. If we win, i think their minds will implode. The media have sure enough done their bit to ensure that we go out there having a point to prove.

All rather smugly tipped Wigan on backchat last night, reminds of 1999 when we had no chance

You remind me of that old Black Sabbath single, Paranoid!