Tony Smith has reflected on his side’s first win over St Helens for six years, as the Black & Whites dominated the reigning champions on Thursday evening.
Hull put in an arguably season-best performance to down Paul Wellens men 34-8 at the MKM Stadium and bounce back from Saturday’s Challenge Cup exit at the hands of the Saints.
Speaking in his post-match press conference, Smith said; “When we’re all on the same page like we have been and getting more consistent, then we can compete with the top teams.
“I keep saying it in these press conferences, but I don’t think the difference between the teams at the top and the teams at the bottom are so drastically different.
“Some weeks you can have a performance but once you’re all in the same sort of systems, I think everybody can challenge each other in this competition. We were a bit more on it today than our opponents.
“I’m not getting carried away with it. Some of that was down to us but some of that was down to them too. That’s how we know not to get carried away with it.”
He continued: “If Saints were on their A-game tonight, or if we allowed them to get on their A-game, it would have been a different story, but I thought we were pretty dominant for most of the game and it’s not very often you can say that when you play St Helens.”
“I thought we were smart, brave and skilful. You’ve got to be, I think if you take Saints on up that middle area of the field, that’s what they want you to do.
“They’ve got some pretty big trackers up there with pretty big rigs, so we had to do it a different way and we did. We came up with another way of troubling them.
“They’ve got their strengths and we’ve got our strengths, and we tried to exploit their weaknesses. You’ve got to be good to do that and you’ve got to be brave to do that. Sometimes, you’ve got to be able to execute under pressure because they put you under a whole lot of pressure. It was a good win.”
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