St Helens boss on withstanding pressure, Hull KR’s consistency and needing a recovery week

St Helens boss Paul Wellens bemoaned his side’s inconsistency throughout the 2025 season as they fell to another defeat at league leaders Hull KR on Friday night.

Whilst Rovers didn’t put in a season-best performance, it was still enough for a 34-4 victory over Saints, and Wellens thought his side were outperformed in just about every area.

Speaking to the media after the match, the Saints coach challenged his side to figure out what they’re doing wrong and find a way to fix it.

He said: “We’re not where we want to be, there’s no shying away from that. It’s been too inconsistent, and the challenge for us from now until the end of the season is to do something about it.

“I can’t sit here and wave a magic wand and come up with superlatives around how we’re going to do that.

“Our only way out of it is to first of all, stick together, and second of all, work really hard to find the obvious improvements that we need to make in our game.

“Whoever takes the field moving forward, we’ve all got a responsibility to make sure our performances are much better.

Wellens shared that the Challenge Cup final week off for his squad has come at a good time as he has a few troops struggling with some niggly injuries.

He added: “There are quite a few banged-up bodies out there tonight. I think 3, 4, 5 of the players were getting stitches throughout the course of the game.

“We’ll certainly recover physically from and be better for it, having a week off.”

St Helens boss credits Hull KR’s consistency and admits his side has plenty to work on

However, he did want to complement Hull KR and their coach Willie Peters, stating they’re the benchmark this season, and his side have to work on being able to challenge the top sides.

He said: “Quite naturally, you have to give the opposition credit, they were better than us tonight.

“I think what makes them as consistent as they are at the moment is that they put all the pieces together.

“They’re not a team that makes a lot of errors, they stay in control of the ruck for large periods.

“When they do lose control, they manage to win it back, and they’ve made themselves a very difficult team to play against and obviously a very difficult team to beat as well.

“We need to be able to be a team that withstands pressure in between games, better than what we are doing at the moment.”

Following last night’s away loss to Hull KR, St.Helens Head Coach Paul Wellens spoke to the press to reflect on the game.

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— St.Helens R.F.C. (@Saints1890) May 31, 2025