WN83

Leeds fans told Cas fans, who told Wigan fans, who reminded Leeds fans and then joined forces with those Leeds fans to tell Leigh fans that the lad is bad news. You’ll always get some fans of his current club trying to make excuses but the sport as a whole will be better when he’s out of it. Getting caught drink driving once is bad enough but twice? You have to wonder how many times he hasn’t been caught while doing it as well. I’ll await his couple of podcast appearances to put his excuses across with interest.

I’m sure they’ve offered him more but I just don’t think it’ll be as vastly different as Sam Burgess made out and I would’ve thought Wire would get him over Huddersfield considering his brother is there, even if it was on a lesser wage (that I’m sure would still have been massive). All things weighed up I think he maybe just thought playing elsewhere and on more money would be a win win and put a bit less pressure on.

There feels a bit more to this than meets the eye. I can't see that the numbers would be so drastically different with Wires financial strength but I could see that Tom Burgess would rather not play under his brother and may be looking down the track and wanting to avoid a potentially awkward situation of Sam either deciding to move on or being moved on. There is a year before he comes here for starters, so he has no ability to impact the start Sam makes to his career at Wire and who knows how it could look in a year or two. Ultimately Wire don't just need big games to turn things anyway, they need to change the whole culture of the place and they need to start changing how they bring young players through. It's not just a case of giving them chances but also showing patience in them and protecting and building their confidence. I think having a guy like Sam Burgess around can be huge in that regard and somebody like Sam Powell at the club will also help. He's not the best hooker in the comp but there won't be many better leaders/professionals knocking about.

Is Nsemba that soon? I watched an interview on Wigan tv the other day and I think he said it would be April. If this is a broken collarbone for Walters, he’ll probably be around April as well, so that’s a lot of games we need to get through with just the two specialist second rowers. As you say Chan struggled there at Wakey, with him wanting to get out and hit people in defence but he left huge gaps. After him, I feel like Dupree could make a good go of playing in the second row. He runs a nice line and does tend to drift wide but it’s a big ask against Penrith.

Only downer for us was what looks like an injury to Walters, that will see him miss the start of the season according to Peet (and presumably Penrith). Damage done to his collarbone. He’d again looked a real handful and I was excited to see what he could do in that Penrith game.

I think we do have to be careful that we don’t talk ourselves down too much because it takes away from us being an attractive proposition to play against. Let’s have it right, we’re better than everyone bar Australia and possibly NZ. I say possibly with NZ because we somehow seem to now be spoken of as though we’ve fallen way below them but we’ve not played them for a while now and when we have in the last decade, we’ve got a good record against them. We’ve been a Samoan semi final blow up away from being pretty perfect in the last couple of years. We have a backline with the sort of athletic ability I’ve not seen in an England side for a very long time and a really promising set of young forwards. We can’t improve our reputation if we don’t have games and I get Wane goes big on building a backs against the wall mentality but sometimes you need to talk yourself up because the other nations and the media down under won’t be doing it for us.

It was the groundsmans kettle that broke the camels back.

Never seen anything like that. Thirteen times the commentators said they’d gone off! New stand looked good (when I could see it) but they shouldn’t have fit motion sensor lights. In terms of the game, Wakey looked really good. They were much the better side.

As pointed out there is Jai Field and then there is Kaide Ellis, who came to Wigan at 24/25 with 19 first team games behind him in the NRL and he is getting better and better over here. I recall Tanginoa coming to Wakey with around 30 games in the NRL under his belt and again he would've been around 24/25 and he's done really well here in spells, so there are some good players matching that profile. I remember George Carmont only making his NRL debut at 24/25 and he was a revelation when he came to Wigan (granted he more NRL games under his belt by that point).

No point, I read a Wigan Athletic fan saying there are only 25,000 Rugby League fans in the whole country, so we'll all be there on the night.

It beggared belief that a 'supporter' of a club would do that in the first place but I think they've made efforts to get on top of that now. Each turnstile has a person now scanning tickets rather than you just putting it in the self serving scanner. I guess some people still try it on but hopefully it's drastically cut it back.

If the capacity is around the 22,800 that was on the other night for the football, it should be a total sell out in the early part of the coming week. To do that before January Pay day and over a month out from the game (when the tickets have only been on sale a few weeks) is a great effort.

Some talk knocking about on RLFans that the capacity is being limited currently for both sides games (usually we wouldn't notice bar the once every two years Saints are in town at Easter) and that just shy of 23,000 allowed in the other night is about what we can expect to be able to sell. Something to do with health and safety licences and them having to swap damaged seats for ones in a good condition until they look at doing a full refurb of them all. If that is the case, I think it'll sell out pretty soon (unless they can find a work around to get more people in).

It’s about as close as the whole of rugby league in the UK will get to an old school test match night under the lights (seeing that the Aussies have given up with us). I’d imagine there will be more neutral fans in attendance because of that and because of how good Penrith have been in recent years, so a total sell out seems a given.

Tickets flying out which is really good to see. I was planning on doing the usual Rugby League thing of waiting until a few days before but I've sorted our 6 seats out now because it's all reserved and the South Stand was getting pretty full aside from the outer blocks. It should be a great night.

Got to make sure tacklers are going in lower, you know where there is a greater chance of them catching a hip or an elbow to their head I think it'll take a couple of days of calming down before some rational thought can come through because currently I can't help but think the game is on a one way street to nowhere. I get the governing body are in a tough spot but this feels OTT. Also, I presume this is just a measure in the UK? We were playing to different rules than in the Southern Hemisphere already but it'll pretty much be a different sport if these changes aren't implemented across the board.

Fingers crossed it can be sorted out. If it could then I guess it would be worth an awful lot of money because as pointed out, it's in an area people want to live.

Piece Hall is a cracking place. We have a drive over from Wigan now and again and saw a couple of bands on during the summer. I've got tickets for the Lathums in Wigan but might try one of the gigs booked in for Halifax.

Sounds like Orrell has turned in to a bit of a dead weight for them. I think the hope was that the land could be sold for a fortune to housing developers but planning permission was turned down due to access problems. Not sure if that could change or not in the future.

The new training ground looks to be worth it's weight in gold. The training facilities are great for the players and it's been an excellent base for supporters on match days and now this. A few clubs look to be trying to get this sort of thing going now, which is really pleasing. I think an advantage for Wigan is that damage to the pitch won't be a major issue with it being on the training ground and not at the DW. They have a running track around it as well and at one end an area for Hammer/shot put/high jump etc and I presume they'll look to put the stage at that end, which should lessen any damage to the pitch. There is a full size all weather pitch on the site as well, away from the main area, so any training schedules shouldn't be massively impacted. Fingers crossed all goes well and it becomes a regular thing and then we start to see some positive financial results.

Really looking forward to it. It’ll be some challenge but you never know. Keeping everything crossed we face no further injury problems, especially in the prop/loose forward areas with Cooper and Havard already ruled out. It’ll be such a vital area for us to try and compete in, up against Fisher-Harris, Leota and Yeo.

Joe Burgess should've stayed at Wigan the first time. He went to the NRL too early for me and his career has never really recovered, or it hasn't hit the heights it should've done.

The thing that confuses me a bit with the changes is that defenders are usually the ones who get concussive head knocks and they'll now need to try and avoid accidental contact with an attackers head, so they're going to need to get lower but that is likely to put their own heads in more danger, as they'll be putting it in the firing line for elbows, hips and knees. It feels like we're trying to make the game 100% safe but it's literally impossible and I'm not sure this move does anything to make it safer and it actually could make it less so.

Hadn't realised it was that high. Leigh's following was understandably impacted by the cup final but in a season opener they'd go close to filling the North Stand. It feels a no brainer that fixture to me, especially with it being a loop fixture, so there is still another home and away fixture each after this one. The buzz is there for both clubs and as pointed it, we'd have cup winners verses league champions (we must have an old charity shield lying around they could play for) and that gives it another dimension. It seems an open goal to me but Matthew Shaw seemed to hint we'd get Catalans. You're probably talking a 5/6k drop off in crowd in that one. Catalans seem to have a crowd that is about as steady as anybody's in the league, around that 8k+ mark whoever they play and whenever in the season they play, so a home tie for them against anybody will get draw a good attendance but also one that isn't likely to be much higher/lower part way through the year.

That feels like a typical RFL strategy so I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s a huge risk that. I look at my suggestion of Wigan vs Leigh. I think it would get around 19,000-20,000 on. That same fixture in the middle of the season for us last year got around 13,000-14,000 from memory. Give Wigan Huddersfield at home this year for example and I think we’d get around that 13/14k mark again, so then you’re relying on circumstance at the time of the Leigh home game to get that 19/20k crowd you could’ve got. It would likely need to be a game between 1st and 2nd (along those lines) to get towards that 20k mark and I’d say that’s extremely unlikely. Wigan vs Leigh and the Hull derby are loop fixtures btw, so there are still 2 more to go at regardless. You have a possibility to use the loop fixtures for a positive purpose but I won’t hold my breath. I think your way of looking at it is likely how they’ll go.