Jonny Lomax has hailed the impact Lee Briers has made at St Helens since making the switch to the Totally Wicked Stadium. After leaving NRL side Brisbane Broncos at the end of the 2024 season, Briers agreed to join up with his hometown club St Helens as an assistant coach.
As such, he has spent the last few months working alongside Eamon O’Carroll and under head coach Paul Wellens to help prepare the Saints for the start of the 2025 campaign and get them back to their best after a difficult year last time around.
Briers, who remains part of Shaun Wane’s set up with England, is regarded as one of the best coaches in the game with St Helens pulling off something of a coup to secure his services and take him back to the north west.
It isn’t hard for Lomax to see how he has managed to build up that reputation, but given the skipper plays in the same half-back position that Briers did as a player, the pair have developed a strong working relationship.
“He’s been really good,” Lomax told Serious About RL when asked about Briers’ impact in Merseyside. “I think Eamon as well, they’ve been really good, the pair of them.
“What they’ve brought is a level of hunger and excitement to be here as well. They had a real excitement to come into the group and they’ve both offered unique things around the areas that they’re working on and really driven it too. Lee is known as a bit of a jokey character but he knows where the line is and that’s what he’s done. He demands, as does Eamon, a certain level from us and that’s been good.
“Lee, from a personal perspective, is good for myself. I met Lee before we started pre-season and one thing that I found was good for me was that we have a similar understanding of the game and how we’d like it to be played and similar ideologies around it.
“That allows me to bounce ideas off him and for myself what I want to do day in, day out is grow. He offers me a real good platform with that, as does Eamon which is good.
“It’s been good with the conversations we’ve had and working together we’re very similar and it becomes a good sounding board for myself to just run something by him and get his thoughts on it, or even sometimes he has done it the other way.