Paul Wellens wants St Helens to prove Super League quality to Aussie doubters
PAUL Wellens is a man on a mission and St Helens are a team on a mission – to prove Super League is worthy of taking on the NRL.
Listen to some and you would wonder why the four-times champions have bothered flying to Australia to take on Penrith in the World Club Challenge.
They think Super League is vastly inferior, Saints are whipping boys and they should bow down at the feet of the mighty Panthers.
But new coach, and playing legend, Wellens is adamant the English game is worthy of the occasion – and people within the game Down Under know it.
He said: “Sometimes you can maybe get that impression.
“But I know people who work within the NRL, those who’ve been to Super League and experienced the competition, certainly think very differently when they’ve seen how we operate over here.
“So experiencing Super League and seeing what quality is over here certainly changes a lot of people’ opinions.
“If we’re honest, across the board the NRL does have a lot more consistency in terms of the competition but that’s not to say we’re doing things poorly in Super League.
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“The challenges that we’ve faced as a club and how hard we’ve had to work in the last few years to achieve the success we’ve had is in my opinion a reflection on the strength of Super League at the moment.”
St Helens face St George-Illawarra in a warm-up clash on Saturday as Wellens gets his head coaching career underway after winning five Super League titles, five Challenge Cups and two World Club Challenges as a player.
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But as they prepare in Sydney, where pretty much everyone writes them off, he knows his players are hellbent on upsetting predictions.
He added: “It’s a different challenge as when I won it as a player, we did it playing in the UK, so it’s different going Down Under.
“But one thing I know about this group is they love a challenge when the odds are stacked against them.
“In everybody’s mind, we’re probably underdogs, but this group love that type of challenge.
“A lot of the time, people make comparisons between Super League and NRL and whether players in this competition can play down there and vice versa.
“This is a great opportunity for us to show as a club how successful we’ve been and how good of a team we are.
“We have, in my mind, the freedom to go and express ourselves and show who we are as a club.
“It almost feels like each year, this group has to prove itself in a different way. Winning four in a row isn’t enough to cement themselves as the best team in Super League history.
“But that’s what we want, we want to keep getting challenged as a club. This is a different way in which we can prove ourselves.”