Cunningham: We need to be smarter at the ruck

St Helens head coach Keiron Cunningham refused to single out individual errors instead criticising his team’s efforts at the ruck.

Ryan Morgan failed to deal with a Todd Carney kick which allowed the latter to feed Michael Dobson who crashed over to effectively seal victory for the Red Devils.

“There was a lot more in that game than just the Ryan Morgan mistake,” he said.

“We just weren’t quite good enough at controlling the ruck in that first period.

“I thought we had been brilliant at that in the last two weeks so to start the game playing second-fiddle in the ruck a little bit really hurt us.”

Cunningham admitted his team did struggle to make a smooth transition following the loss of half-back Theo Fages to a head injury in the opening minute.

“Losing Theo sort of upset everything and we looked really clunky in that first half,” he added.

“You don’t have people on your bench for that, but we juggled things around at half-time and then it started to flow a little bit better for us.”

There was a spell where the momentum was firmly with Saints, as they scored two tries in seven minutes after the break and Cunningham suggested they should have pushed on.

“We dominated large periods and had a real purple patch which we should have capitalised on a little bit more,” he said.

“We had plenty of ball down that end of the field but unfortunately we didn’t and that’s the result.”