VILA Matautia was fired up for the game on Sunday and I was concerned with a bit of inconsistency with the referee and touch judges.

He was constantly intimidating markers at the play-the-ball. On one occasion just before half-time he grabbed the shirt of Ian Knott and stopped him from chasing Chris Joynt who ran from dummy half and would have scored a try but for a brilliant tackle from Lee Penny. It was a blatant obstruction by Vila and he had done it on a couple of other occasions before that.

Only a few weeks ago, when we played Hull at Wilderspool, David Highton spent 10 minutes in the sin bin for pulling a player's shirt in only the second minute.

I was concerned and amazed that Vila was still on the field.

St. Helens deserved to be a man down after his high tackle on Danny Nutley which saw him placed on report. Because that was the third time Vila had been warned for high tackles. There was even one when he had possession of the ball and ran with his elbow high.

In the end Vila received a three match suspension and I suppose that is justice.

Don't get me wrong, I like it tough, I like it physical but within the rules of the game. Players have got to be protected by referees from these kinds of indiscretions. In my opinion, someone is going to end up badly injured. Someone will end up with a broken jaw and do we have to wait until someone has gone that far before we start to really penalise the players who are taking these kind of shots?

Reflecting on the St. Helens game generally, we do seem to have a problem in overcoming, psychologically, teams like Saints.

I know Darryl's mindful of it and is working hard on it. And probably just a slight change in attitude from some of the players will see us winning through. But in fairness to Darryl and myself we can't put right overnight or in one game what's been wrong for a number of years.

And that is we are a bit of a confidence team. If we're doing things right and things are going right for us we tend to get on a roll. But when things haven't gone quite right and we have to dig in, we seem to fall apart a bit. We did a little bit of that on Sunday.

I also think we were on the wrong side of '50-50' calls in both the Leeds and St. Helens games. There were two or three mean calls at Leeds and a couple in the Saints game, specially the Danny Farrar incident when he was going towards the try line and had the ball knocked out of his hands and the referee completely missed it. That was a tragedy because six play-the-balls later Keiron Cunningham went over to make it 18-0 and the game had gone beyond us. That's the way it goes but who knows what the results could have been?

I also think we were a pretty tired team on Sunday, specially in the second half. Over a 15 minute spell they ran over us with three good tries and we were completely exposed.

But I should say that none of these points have been missed by the coaching staff. We know where we are, where we stand and it is up to us to try and put things right. We need to work harder with the players we've got, knowing we can improve them, and also make some slight changes in personnel in a couple of key positions to make us more effective.

Finally, I would like to let fans know about our position with New Balance. We've now officially discontinued our involvement with New Balance after an amicable settlement.

They had indicated to us that they were having a change of direction and have decided to pull out of the football/rugby market. It does look like they'll continue with the club at a lower level but they wanted to discontinue their association with us as our kit marketing partner.

We've thanked them for their involvement with the club for the last couple of years, in two years when no-one else wanted to know the club. It has been great, they've helped the club when the club needed it.

I'll let the fans know over the next couple of weeks what is happening because we have got interest from several new kit marketing partners and I'm exploring some of them now.

Converted for the new archive on 13 March 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.