Leon Pryce is no stranger to the occasional faux pas and his mocking complaint while on tour with the Great Britain squad last year that he would rather be on Blackpool beach than Bondi brought the opprobrium of the Australian nation on his head. He was in the midst of another foot-in-mouth incident at Old Trafford, where the St Helens stand-off will appear in a record seventh Grand Final against Leeds Rhinos tomorrow, when he pulled back from the brink.

“Whichever team finishes top [of the league table] should be champions, just like football, then we could have separate play-offs,” Pryce said. “Because Australia do it, for some reason we’ve got to do it as well.”

Perhaps appreciating that this was not quite the thing to say on the eve of the tenth Grand Final, a concept that is embedded in the sporting consciousness, he added: “But, at the same time, we’ve had so much success with it, it has been brilliant, so I agree with both ways, in a way.”

Pryce is rarely far from controversy. He went into the Challenge Cup final in August after the game’s first ball-tampering incident, when he was caught on camera during the semi-final squeezing the testicles of Sam Burgess, the Bradford Bulls player. His typical response at Wembley was a joint man-of-the-match contribution with Paul Wellens to the defeat of Catalans Dragons.

No opponent poses more of an attacking threat to Leeds at Old Trafford, where Pryce won three times with Bradford, his home-town club, and with St Helens last year. A fifth winner’s ring would mean that he would have to use both hands, although he gave his 2005 medal to his father “and the rest are in a box somewhere”. Whatever he thinks of the Grand Final as a means of determining the title-winners, Pryce has done well since its inception in 1998.

“Don’t get me wrong, each time is special and you never get sick of these occasions,” he said. “You’ve got to treasure these moments. Some players go careers without getting here. I lost my first final in 1999 to Saints when I was 18 and it’s only through experiencing the lows that you get to appreciate the highs. It’s also from experience that you learn not to stress yourself out.”

There is no danger of that with Pryce, whose ability to handle the nerves and block out the crowd is what helps to make him a big-game player, who haunted Leeds as Bradford’s match-winner in 2005. His audacious try beat the Rhinos in Saints’ brutal 10-8 qualifying semi-final victory a fortnight ago. “The toughest game I’ve played in other than Test matches, after which I felt sore for three days,” he said. “They’d beaten us twice and it was another game Leeds could easily have won. They have our utmost respect.”