St Helens 26–28 Bradford Bulls — Qualifying Semi-Final, 2002 Super League Finals Series

Qualifying Semi-Final, 2002 Super League finals series: St Helens 26–28 Bradford Bulls, at Knowsley Road, St Helens on 5 Oct 2002.

Sourcing caveat: This is the weakest-verified match of the whole 2002-2008 backfill: only the two goal-kickers (Paul Sculthorpe 3 goals for St Helens, Paul Deacon 4 goals for Bradford) could be confirmed with any confidence. The arithmetic implies five tries for each team (5x4+6=26 for St Helens; 5x4+8=28 for Bradford), but repeated attempts to identify the individual try-scorers from Rugby League Project's match page and Wikipedia's 2002 Bradford Bulls season article did not produce a reliable, complete list — reported here as an open gap rather than guessed names. Referee is also unconfirmed and left blank rather than guessed. Bradford's lineup on this page mixed a sequential 1-17 position-order index with a separate real squad number for each player in the same row, matching exactly the same conflation pattern 13bc found on Bradford's 2003 Qualifying Semi-Final page; the real numbers were used here too (e.g. Michael Withers 6, Stuart Fielden 29, Jamie Peacock 12), and they cross-match number-for-number against this same club's independently-fetched Grand Final lineup two weeks later. Bradford's bench genuinely prints only 2 names (Paul Anderson, Brian McDermott) rather than 4, confirmed via a targeted re-fetch — a source-side gap, not a fetch artifact. St Helens' lineup on this page shows an unusual and internally-consistent-but-atypical arrangement — Paul Wellens (1) printed at Halfback and Anthony Stewart (19) at Fullback, with Sean Long (7), St Helens' near-ubiquitous regular halfback throughout this file's other 2002 and 2003 entries, printed on the bench rather than starting. This was checked via three independent re-fetches, including one requesting the raw row order verbatim, all returning the identical arrangement, so it is not a fetch artifact; but it does not match this same club's Elimination Final (11 October) or Grand Final (19 October) lineups later this same fortnight, where Wellens reverts to his usual Fullback slot and Long starts at Halfback, and no independent second source describing this specific one-match switch could be found. Recorded as printed, flagged here for a future check if a better source turns up — the same treatment given to Danny McGuire's unusual 2003 Leeds Fullback listing in 13bc.