Paul Rowley described St Helens’ win over Huddersfield Giants as ‘awfully boring’ after becoming the latest head coach to critique the captain’s challenge.

Following on from Sam Burgess’ comments last week, Rowley was the latest to bemoan the length of time reviews are taking, with a number of long stoppages as Saints held off the Giants’ second half comeback to win 26-18.

For Saints, returning to winning ways was the priority, and that is precisely what they did, even if they ultimately made it harder than it needed to be.

“Before we got here today, I think the main priority was making sure we just got a win and get back on the horse,” Rowley said. “I think after the first half, in a commanding lead, then we obviously wanted to kick on, but we sensed a little bit of a worrying trend, getting a little bit sloppy towards the back end of the first half. We addressed it in the second half, but of course it continued.

“As they’ve shown before, most recently against Warrington, that when they’re chasing the game and they’re throwing passes out and offloads and it’s getting scrappy, then they’re pretty good when the game’s chaotic. So we needed to reduce the chaos by being a little bit more disciplined in how we went about our business. So we contributed to that chaos.

“There were other contributing factors, video ref decisions, challenges, etc., which made the game awfully boring. It’s like a 10 to 10 finish. It’s not good on a school night, is it?”

St Helens guilty of arrogance

Despite winning, Rowley was not impressed with how his side took their foot off the gas. They were leading 24-0 at half-time but ended up only winning by eight points.

“We’ve not won well. That sort of statement is probably something we were guilty of at half-time, arrogance.

“Do we have to win well? We’re playing a Super League team here who on paper spend the same amount of money as us and probably the same resource as us. It’s an arrogant statement in itself really and something we were probably guilty of. We addressed that and spoke about that and need to be a little bit more respectful of our opponents.”