Last-gasp heartache

Jul 19 2003 By Doug Thomson, The Huddersfield Daily Examiner

St Helens 22 - 18 Huddersfield Giants. Second half mistakes so costly after super Costin stuns Saints.

HUDDERSFIELD Giants fans took another ride on the Super League rollercoaster at Knowsley Road.

And after the highs of the wins over Wigan and Leeds came the low of last night's heart-breaking last-gasp loss to St Helens.

Tony Smith's battlers were within two minutes of their first win at the venue since 1978 and their first double over Saints in 52 years.

But the home side, who were able to show only occasional flashes of the skills which made them Super League champions last season, staged an act of escapology which had home fans in a 9,288 crowd breathing a sigh of relief and left the travelling faithful with their heads in their hands.

What made the final scoreline even harder to stomach for the claret and gold band behind the posts the Giants were attacking in the second half was that they had just seen close-up their favourites piling on the pressure in a bid to stretch an 18-16 lead and seal a third successive win.

When Stanley Gene's awkward kick just evaded the stretching Paul Reilly but still forced Saints to scramble the ball dead and then kick out, the stage seemed set for an up the jumper finish by the Giants.

But determined hooker Keiron Cunningham forced Iain Morrison to spill possession early in the tackle count, and the resulting scrum provided one last set of six for Saints which finished with Paul Wellens surging over and Sean Long adding the goal for a four-point advantage.

Wellens' sin-binning had proved costly for Ian Millward's men during a first half in which Huddersfield scored 14 points without reply thanks to two more sparkling tries by in-form Brandon Costin, who has now crossed the whitewash in six successive games and taken his tally for the season to 16.

To be fair to Saints, they looked far stronger in the second half, when Wellens' move from full-back to centre helped put the clamp on Costin, but even though their error rate rose markedly, the Giants rightly felt more than a little hard done by.

Normally, to push the reigning champions so close on their own patch would be a cause for optimism, but given recent results and the raised level of expectation, this defeat will have been a bitter pill to swallow.