It was the sporting performance of the weekend. Probably of the year.
By Martin Johnson
Last Updated: 11:34PM BST 05 Oct 2008
The television cameras get everywhere nowadays, but if they had turned on the microphones as well, Daniel Andersons half-time address to his St Helens troops would have made Joe Kinnears midweek observations on the football media sound like an episode of Listen with Mother.
The Old Trafford changing rooms are no strangers to the Alex Ferguson hair-dryer, but in terms of stripping the wallpaper, this was the difference between blow torch and napalm. Its just as well Manchester United arent short of a few quid, because theyll have to send for a team of plasterers before they can get on with the painting and decorating.
You had to feel for the St Helens players in the teeth of this onslaught from their departing coach. It was pouring down outside, and blowing a gale inside. Rain, so the pundits said, might prove to be the great equaliser between Saints silky skills and the Leeds power game, and this was the first time that the 2-5 favourites had been beaten since early April.
The half-time incendiary device dressed in a suit initially galvanised St Helens into levelling the scores with an early second-half try, but Leeds were the team on fire. Not everyone made St Helens such overwhelming favourites, as they almost blew the Challenge Cup final against Hull, and on Saturday night they ran into a Leeds side who tackled so fiercely they could tie these boys to the end of a crane and use them to demolish old houses.
Old Trafford is used to seeing players hit the deck, but they tend to remain there writhing in agony when bowled over by a passing puff of wind. These, though, are frighteningly hard men, and when Leeds Jamie Jones-Buchanan came out of a collision gushing so much blood from his forehead that he turned from a tough geezer into a tough geyser, he was bandaged up and back in the fray in less time than it takes Lewis Hamilton to return from a tyre change.
The Grand Final is the rough equivalent of the Super Bowl, except that there are no crash helmets and only minimal padding. The game has come a long way since it was the BBCs Saturday afternoon flagship sport on Grandstand, when dear old Eddie Waring delivered his lines to the chagrin of the sports heartland following in much the same way as he did when partnering Stuart Hall in Its a Knockout.
However, when you see such a rousing game as this, you wonder why its migratory powers are so limited. The birds will soon be flying south, but rugby league sheds its feathers no further than the sign saying last fish and chip shop before leaving Yorkshire. It was the same with Henmania an exclusively Middle England virus, confined to a small portion of south-west London.
Maybe it requires England to win the World Cup in Australia, as their union counterparts did in 2003, to spread the gospel. Saturday night will have converted many of those southerners whose pulse rate has hitherto failed to respond to a wet Saturday afternoon in Castleford, though when the World Cup kicks off in three weeks time, the sports capacity to expand its appeal will be hamstrung by its availability to satellite dish owners only.
Nonetheless, this match was a magnificent advertisement in which the apparently irresistible force ran into a bruisingly immovable object. Television viewers would have watched some of the tackles from behind the sofa and marvelled at the way
St Helens lightning break for the opening try was finished off by a prop forward travelling like a winger.
The scorer, James Graham, had just been voted the seasons Man of Steel, but the key to this match was that Leeds had an entire team of them.
