Leeds went fully pro within the same time frame and won zip.

Don’t confuse the poor chap with facts.

It’s obvious we were full time and everyone else’s squad was filled with miners and mill workers who were subsided a days pay to play on the weekend.

Today where a number of teams can’t afford to utilise the full salary cap and where certain teams have had seasons playing significantly less games than others and refused to release players for internationals is a perfectly level playing field.

Agree, top teams not only spend to the full cap, but take advantage of having up to two marquee players per season whilst other teams may only be able to afford 75-80% of the cap = still not a level playing field. Just need to look at which teams have won the GF since 1998.

Awww bless you.

Hopefully the Wigan players also think this result was due to just missing Walmsley rather than the players clearly switching off for two weeks with Toulouse and Whitehaven to play after whipping everyone else. We left Roby on the bench for 60 minutes - it's clear we went into this game soft and paid the price - fair play to Toulouse. Saying it's because Al didn't play is to massively over-simplify, it was clear from minute one when we didn''t field a kick off then conceded from the first set that we weren't at the races

Attitude was miles off, the same team beats most of SL with their heads switched on, Walmsley or no Walmsley.

We hear about how poor SL is, then on other threads I'm reading you have two players better than Ben Barba! I suppose we'll see how overrated everyone except Walmsley is come Good Friday.

Firstly, the first enforced Covid break in 2020 allowed every team in the league to have a longer pre-season. Any players with injuries, knocks or recovering from operations had longer to recover. Not only Saints benefited from that.

Secondly, we also won the CC in 2021 which meant that we played extra games than any other team apart from Castleford so I'd love someone to supply me with statistics of just how many less games we played overall than other teams.

I don't deny that we have been relatively injury free compared to others but again how much of that is luck? Years of being mostly injury free is luck? I'm not so sure. Look at the mess Wigan made of rushing Bevan French back and the way they managed Burgess. Would Saints S & C team have done the same? Not a chance. I remember under Mick Potter that we had a period of suffering a lot of quad injuries. That was attributed to particular training programs and an obsession of putting size on. Certain teams suffer with certain injuries, it wasn't so long ago that Wigan fans on here were questioning your own S & C team due to the number of hamstring injuries suffered.

We were so lucky with injuries last year we lost our scrum half for the season in the middle of a cup final and played the rest of the season with an academy 7. Maybe other teams just find more excuses when they're missing a few, as we were for chunks of the season, or have worse juniors. Whisper it (as people won't like to hear it) maybe they are even less professional in their preparation or not as fit?

Or maybe the same clubs are unlucky and the same clubs lucky over years and years and conditioning/depth/balanced squad building/junior development has nothing to do with it.

Also lost Bentley for the season from Magic Weekend. He was one of the stand out back rowers that season. Lees with an achilles for 10-12 weeks around that time too.

The fact you can point so easily to individual injuries and when they were out sums it up. Other teams have that many it’s impossible to list them all, when they were out, which games they over lapped in. It all just merges in to ‘we had 8+, 10+ out etc’ for large spells of the season.

We’re going round in circles on the injury front. It’s a mixture of good conditioning and good fortune and you clearly have had both.

Moving over to the quality of the competition, it’s dreadful. Imagine a side finishing 4th playing like we did last year. We’ve won 5 from 6 this season playing ‘so so’. Saints are head and shoulders the best side on the league, no doubts about it but the quality across the board is so so poor. Talk of a 4th consecutive title cementing their place as the best ever superleague side is laughable really. It’s not even close to being Saints best side IMO.

On paper it would be as no one has ever achieved that feat so whilst the opinion is subjective, it would probably go down in history as the best (until someone else does the same)

However I keep coming back to the salary cap. The Saints side of 2000 was incredible however in that team was Wellens, Long, Cunningham and Sculthorpe. Thats without including the likes of Newlove, Sullivan or the Aussie imports who would have been on good money. There is no way now that you can fit the quality of those players into the same team but what we have done really well is to recruit well and blood our own. Our 1, 6, 7, 9 and 13 spine are all Academy grown players. We bought well from the Championship in the likes of Batchelor and Bentley so I'd say us lauding the Saints team of 2019-2022 is perfectly allowed.

It's not as though we have blown teams out of the water spending fortunes etc so with the restraints of a salary cap, I'd say to win it 3 in a row (and being the team to beat for the 4th year) should be applauded. That's the frustrations Saints fans have. Whilst I am being accused of not recognising the points you all make about injuries or a poor comp, I can turn that on its head and say that none of you will give us the due credit. We are just known as "the best of a bad bunch" it seems.

It all comes down to cycles, for periods of time certain clubs seem to have a golden period. It is a combination of factors at the time - the right players, the right coaching and even luck all come together to make a team seemingly so much better than everyone else for a period of time. Bradford were almost unbeatable in the Noble era then Leeds with Sinfield etc were the top team - Saints have that now and their fans should enjoy it while they can because the history of the game shows clearly that it will come to an end at some point and another club will rise instead. Who knows which one..

Arguments about if SL is better now or in the past are fairly meaningless as the game changes - the style of play now is very different from say in the late 90s or early 2000s, driven in part by changing rules as much as anything. That has a knock-on effect in the types of players as well - how many off-loading props are there now or playing making 13s? It is not that players are worse as such just a different type of player is valued these days and defensive patterns have improved as well.

Let me exaggerate the situation in order to illustrate the point. If we played 1 game and won it for a hundred per cent record (but played lots of games in other different competitions) and you played 28 games including a 27 game unbeaten run but lost the last one, would that make us genuine champions in your eyes? Also would you call that an even competition?

It doesn't matter that you played more games in a different competition; we are discussing the Superleague and how you had an advantage in that competition.

I'm not even sure how you see any room for argument. It's a simple statement of fact.