Head Coach Justin Holbrook paid credit to the "attitude" and "patience" his Saints players showed in the victory over a determined London Broncos side at the Totally Wicked Stadium.
First half tries from Dom Peyroux, Regan Grace and Theo Fages set Saints on our way before Lachlan Coote and Kevin Naiqama scored second half tries to sink the stubborn Broncos.
And the boss admitted in his post match press conference that he was pleased with his team’s attitude and patience in the win.
“It was a good game and I was obviously really pleased with the result, Holbrook told reporters. “I said in the week, that I could see why London got promoted to Super League, they are a real hard working team and they did that again tonight.
“We were unlucky not to score another four or five tries, but to their credit they kept us out. I want to give our boys a big rap, they can be difficult games these ones and we turned up and gave a real quality performance as we did last week and that is the most pleasing thing for me.”
Holbrook admitted London were difficult to plan for given their unorthodox style of play, whilst he also singled out the excellent Theo Fages and Jonny Lomax who impressed in the halves.
“I thought we controlled the game really well, in particularly our halves, I thought Theo Fages and Jonny Lomax were outstanding for us tonight. We had to play with a lot of patience because they were deliberately slowing the game down. We got a lot of penalties, but we kept calm in that situation and I thought it was a great performance.
“They were hard to play against, he continued. “They are full of trick shots, they come with a lot of plays, right from the start with the short kick off and continued like that. They go with 50/50s and they kick balls in-between no-man’s land and try and force some luck, but I thought we did well to nullify that.
“I probably did the biggest lot of video work this week because they were a bit of the unknown and to the players credit I thought they had a real good attitude tonight and put in a good performance.”
The boss concluded by praising the newest members of the squad who are slowly finding their feet in a Saints shirt.
“It was great to see him [Kevin Naiquama] get a bit more ball in that second half in the space and he is only going to get better the more he settles into our side. Cootey [Lachlan Coote] is getting better every week and Joseph Paulo is too. The more time he can get out there and get used to the combinations the better, so I thought it was really good.”
