{"id":589985,"date":"2026-05-18T04:48:07","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T04:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/589985\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T04:48:07","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T04:48:07","slug":"barrow-raiders-6-42-st-helens-saints-start-womens-super-league-season-with-big-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/589985\/","title":{"rendered":"Barrow Raiders 6-42 St Helens: Saints start Women&#8217;s Super League season with big win"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Challenge Cup finalists St Helens started the Women&#8217;s Super League season with a thumping 42-6 win at Barrow Raiders.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Saints, who beat Leeds Rhinos to set up a Wembley final with Wigan last week, took an early lead through Dani McGifford&#8217;s score before three tries in the final 10 minutes from Mia Drescher, Caitlin Casey and Mikayla Gillespie made it 22-0 at the break.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Leah Cottier got the home side on the scoreboard but McGifford quickly went over twice more to complete her hat-trick.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Zoe Harris extended their advantage and McGifford rounded off the scoring with her fourth.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It was a fabulous start to the season for 31-year-old former heptathlete McGifford, who was the joint top try-scorer in Super League last season.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Saints join <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/sport\/rugby-league\/articles\/cy52pzer41yo\" class=\"ssrcss-18834jl-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">reigning champions Wigan and York<\/a> in starting the season with a win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Challenge Cup finalists St Helens started the Women&#8217;s Super League season with a thumping 42-6 win at Barrow&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":589986,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-589985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=589985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589985\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/589986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=589985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=589985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=589985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}