St Helens star Jack Welsby admits he feared a repeat of England’s golden point World Cup loss to Samoa after spilling a kick that enabled Penrith to send the World Club Challenge into over-time.
Welsby fumbled before Samoa’s Stephen Crichton kicked the match winning field goal and he put down a Nathan Cleary bomb that led to Brian To’o’s 79th minute try for the Panthers.
“I thought ‘what have I done’. It was reminiscent of the Samoa game where I knocked on and I thought ‘I have done it again for Saints’,” said Welsby, who was man-of-the-match in the 13-12 triumph.
Match Highlights: Panthers v Saints
“It is a similar group of lads who just worked so hard to get to where they are, and I have gone and bombed it again.”
The Super League champions had four England players in their line-up and a fifth, Joe Batchelor, ran onto the field in a moon boot after Lewis Dodd’s 83rd minute field goal.
With the Panthers boasting six members of Samoa’s World Cup squad, the heartache of November 27-26 loss was always in the back of the mind of Welsby, Morgan Knowles, Tommy Makinson and Matty Lees.
This is the greatest English rugby league achievement in living memory.
Alex Walmsley
Prop Walmsley added: “We have got four or five lads who were in the English side that came up short in the World Cup semi-final and they played against so many of them [Panthers] but they have come out here and shown what they are about.”
After winning a record four consecutive grand finals, St Helens confirmed their standing as the greatest team of the Super League era by becoming just the second English team to win in Australia.
Wigan last achieved the feat in 1994 when they defeated the Broncos in Brisbane and new Saints coach Paul Wellens - a St Helens legend - described the win as the most significant in the club’s 150-year history.
St Helens: World Club Challenge
Wellens revealed St Helens had devoted an entire training session to limiting the impact of Nathan Cleary's kicking game and Penrith coach, Ivan Cleary, said the English side was capable of winning the NRL.
Maybe they win it. I think they would get pretty close.
Ivan Cleary
"They are full of great players, they are a winning club. It’s hard to say but they would probably go all right.”
However, Welsby said the victory didn’t completely erase the pain of England’s 27-26 World Cup exit at Emirates Stadium.
“It’s a different type of feeling because this is club rugby and that was international, and the international game is so important” 21-year-old Welsby said.
“Obviously that was a massive spectacle, but this is just as big a spectacle and it puts the Super League back on the map.
“To come here and play against the two-times NRL champions and turn them over on their own patch is pretty special.
“We’ve done it four times back home and we were under no illusion that we could come here and do it, but it was probably the toughest game I’ve ever played in.”
Dodd missed last year’s Super League grand final after rupturing his Achilles but the 20-year-old halfback showed great composure to put aside two missed field goal attempts in regular time and slot the winning kick in extra time.
Saints go marching
“It is a moment you dream of as a kid, and even last night,” Dodd said. “When I got a clean shot I knew it was going over.
We made a bit of history with that one point.
“You can’t experience highs in this game if you don’t experience lows and missing the grand final was definitely one of the lowest and this is one of the highest.”
Few gave St Helens a chance of winning, with Penrith’s inaugural premiership winning coach Phil Gould predicting a cricket score when he tweeted: “They should be able to declare at halftime”.
Walmsley said the Saints players had been determined to prove the critics wrong.
“I am not going to undersell it, this is one of the greatest achievements in our sport - for Super League, for St Helens and for English rugby league,” he said.
“There was probably only the 17 or 18 players, the coaching staff and the 800 fans who came over and supported us who believed in us. I think the rest of the world gave us absolutely no chance at all.
“We embraced that, and we thought we are just going to show them what we are made of.
“There are no excuses, we have come over here and done it on their side of the world.
There is that massive kind of 'get that into you'.
“They have been back-to-back champions, they have been head-and-shoulders the best team in the NRL - the best league in the world - for two years straight. No one has touched them.
“When we are done and we are retired we can say we did something special.”