Saints are class, I don’t buy into there depth issues too much, like us lesser know players with squad numbers 23+ will be good talents. I’d never really heard of Dodd this time last year.

They are the standard we need to be competing with.

The referees did their best to spoil that game last night.

The referees are a perennial problem, but they didn't have much bearing on last night's result. Saints were class, Catalan were rubbish.

Still getting every 50/50 call I see. Like someone else mentioned, I don't think Walmsley has played the ball correctly for 3 seasons.

Walmsley plays for a penalty every time he plays the ball he moves forward into the defender ive seen penalties given that way.

I had to laugh on one of the last plays of the game when Walmsley basically got up and had a discussion with the ref for a couple of seconds about how clearly he’d felt there had been an infringement and the ref took his time, agreed and give the penalty.

That’s the closest I’ve seen to a player refereeing the game themselves. He’s certainly from the JP school of building relationships with the official is Big Al.

I said that to my sons last night.
Walmsley is a fantastic player but wants a free kick for lots of tackles whilst walking forward before playing the ball.
At some point a referee will pick up on this and it will be interesting to see how they react to it.

They got away with at least one forward pass for a try but it didn't even get a mention from Terry while he regaled about their great rugby.

For all that they are very professional and have an incredible defence. A pity they didnt test themselves against Penrith.

Sadly they're still the team to beat, do the basics to a very high standard and punish every error.
I thought the turning point was after Davis made that 50m break then dropped the ball as he was getting up, Catalans never seemed to have any ball or territory after that, game over.

It was interesting that during the set picked by John Wilkin to highlight their defence that, for the ptb under the posts, the Saints defenders were literally stood side by side. Get pinged for that as they should have been and Catalans were 30 yards down field instead of being trapped in their own 20. It's fine margins at times between looking good and bad and the referees have a big part to play.

That said, Saints were excellent and deserved their luck when it came. Catalans were an indisciplined mess and just awful! I thought it spoke volumes that they were actually on top when concentrating on playing rugby. The turning point came when Davies tried to milk a penalty instead of getting on with the job (although, to be fair, he was reacting to yet another Saints player not being penalised for pushing their luck in the tackle). They quickly spiralled downhill from that point.

Snap!

There first try 3 yards forward.

That’s the one I was referring to.
Makinson was stretching to catch it in front of him.

Looked like a blatant forward with the referee and touch judge perfectly positioned.

I wouldn’t disagree with 3 tries either.