Bill Leyland completes unlikely St Helens comeback to stun leaders Wigan

The derby rarely fails to disappoint, but just when you think this 130-year-old rivalry cannot get any more unbelievable, this happens. The scoreline looks unremarkable, but that tells only a fraction of the story of the 367th meeting between St Helens and Wigan.

The pre-match talk was not who would win, it was how many Wigan, the league leaders going into the Easter programme, would win by. Saints, humiliated 52-10 at Hull KR last week, were without a dozen first-team regulars, many of them starters. They soon lost a 13th when prop Agnatius Paasi limped off after four minutes.

It all looked to be going to script as late as 71 minutes into proceedings. Wigan had rode off a spirited effort and forged a 14-point lead that looked more than enough. But what happened next will live in the folklore of St Helens for a long, long time as they produced a comeback for the ages, inspired by the unlikeliest of heroes.

Bill Leyland was not even a St Helens player at the start of this week, joining the club on a one-match loan from Hull KR to alleviate their injury crisis. He was thrown on to the pitch with 20 minutes left after Daryl Clark, Saints’ starting hooker, took a heavy knock. Given the score at that stage, it seemed his time with the club would be short, sweet and forgettable.

However, after tries from Jackson Hastings and Tristan Sailor summoned a grandstand finale from nowhere, Leyland stepped forward with three minutes remaining to barge his way over from dummy-half in a manner reminiscent of the great St Helens hooker Keiron Cunningham. Suddenly, the hosts were ahead for the first time.

Leyland was then the lucky recipient of the resulting kick-off as Wigan chanced their arm to get the ball back. In the blink of an eye, he had gone from a footnote in Saints’ history to a Good Friday hero.

Bill Leyland is mobbed by his St Helens teammates after his second try. Photograph: Olly Hassell/SWpix.com/Shutterstock

“It’s very special,” Saints’ coach, Paul Rowley, said. “It’s a story, isn’t it? The adversity we were under during the game, before the game.

“You know the saying, never write off the Saints. The belief and the character has never been questioned within this group.”

For more than an hour this was nothing but a win for Wigan. But the fact that they collapsed in such spectacular fashion prompts questions over a side that had won their first five games, but have now suffered back-to-back losses.

“I can accept it was an intense game and finished in an exciting manner, but we’ve got to be better than that,” Matt Peet, the Wigan coach, said.

His side led an absorbing game by two points at half-time thanks to tries from Harry Smith and Jack Farrimond and when Jai Field, who missed four games out after an operation to remove his appendix, and Zach Eckersley extended the advantage to 24-10 going into the final quarter, you would have been forgiven for assuming the derby had been decided. But, as Rowley said, you can never write off St Helens.

Injury-hit, visibly out on their feet and with the odds against them, they summoned the strength to go again. First, Hastings finished a Lewis Murphy break. Then Sailor wriggled his way across.

Suddenly, the home crowd began to believe. It laid the platform perfectly for Leyland to take centre stage and settle the derby in a way few could have envisaged just minutes earlier.

Leyland is 23 and will return to Hull KR next week and there is a fair chance he will never produce anything quite as remarkable as what he did in the biggest contest of them all.