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Boss Eamon O’Carroll wants St Helens to send club legend Jonny Lomax out on a high. The 35-year-old play-maker has spent 11 weeks on the sidelines with a fractured jaw, but returned in last night’s 34-6 home loss to Leeds Rhinos. It was a miserable night for Saints, but Lomax’s comeback was one of their few highlights and he provided the pass which led to Jack Welsby racing clear for the hosts’ only try. Lomax is set to retire at the end of this season and O’Carroll said in his post-match press conference: “Jonny never makes it about him, he is team-first. “He could probably have played a few weeks ago, but understood that we had a short time to get the team going and we’d started to get a bit of rhythm. “He put his hand up today and I thought he was good. He deserves to go out on a bit of a high. “Words can’t do justice to how highly I think of him and the club thinks of him as well.” He added: “He has overcome so much adversity in his career, it’s frightening. “He has had 19 or maybe 20 surgeries and I think he had half of them before he was 23 or maybe a bit younger. “He is stubborn, but in a good way and that’s why we love him. He doesn’t shy away from a challenge and when people think he’s down he keeps getting back up. “We’ve said to the young lads, follow what he does, listen to him, look at what he does. “If you want to be a Saints player you model yourself on someone like Jonny Lomax.” St Helens’ new coach, World Cup fail and Hull KR’s top six chances – Click here to watch this week’s episode of the Serious About Rugby League Show St Helens’ objective ‘not dead yet’ Yesterday’s defeat was a huge setback to Saints’ hopes of qualifying for the play-offs, but O’Carroll revealed their main emotion was “disappointment with the nature of how that got away from us”. He said: “We are trying to build for more than just this year. There’s a clear objective there and it’s not dead yet, we’ll still attack that. “I think putting some things in place for the future of the club is really important. For a period there we took a step back and it’s important we address that.” O’Carroll had no complaints about the result. He insisted: “Credit goes to Leeds, I thought they were outstanding. “In terms of us, I think the start to the game, the first 30 minutes – even though we conceded and went down a man – I thought we were good, really attritional. “As were Leeds, I thought it was going to look like a top-end game, but that wasn’t to be. “Their second try was way off our standard. Maybe we were a bit unlucky with the third one, a bit of a ricochet, but Leeds worked well to get that. “Coming in 18 points down, I didn’t think it was an 18-0 half, though I did think Leeds were better in that half. “Some of our end of sets were really lateral, like we were chasing points and the start to the second half wasn’t great either. We contributed massively to our downfall.”