Super League and World Club Champions against a team with no trophies, Wigan must be favourites.

Got to take into account that farmers field Saints play on, it no doubt suits their plough it down the middle bore the opposition Into submission approach to the game but for Wigan "The Entertainers" of the rugby league world it certainly doesn't do us any favours

Bell lost his appeal and Asiata won his, they seem a tad upset over the lump

Easy win for Wigan by 12-16 points

Absolute joke that

All Wigan/Saints banter aside the Asiata decision is beyond baffling, I know he’s out for a long while so any ban would’ve been irrelevant but how he’s got away with diving in like that is staggering

Because first contact is above the knee I thought they would find it hard to uphold the charge. Still reckless though

Not sure what they expected with Bell. It looked like a potential hip drop which needs to be outlawed as much as possible so the game avoids injuries such as Coopers last year.

And yet they don’t seem concerned at all about stamping out a clearly dangerous technique that caused 3 injuries (2 long term) in the same game and that es players off every time it’s used. Weird

Grown men thinking there’s a conspiracy in the RFL wanting one rugby league team to beat another rugby league team is absolutely embarrassing.

The hate peddled on there is just bizarre.

There is no conspiracy against Saints obviously but it's the lack of consistency that winds me up. I think the Bell one is harsh personally but I can see why they've given it because his feet came off the floor temporarily. I still think you will see 5 of those a game that go unpunished though.

However the Asiata one really baffles me and I'm far more aggrieved with that one than the Bell one. We all saw what he did to Paasi last year and we all saw how reckless his technique was. At the time there was no law against it so we had to suck it up. The RFL then go and change the rules and bring in a charge relating to reckless contact with lower limbs when there is no control and no wrapping of the arms. Asiata then does the exact same technique but because he's got lucky and made contact slightly above the knee they've bottled it. For me he should have 100% been found guilty of reckless contact, because that's clearly what it is. If he carries on then someone else will be out for 6, 9, 12 months with a knee blown to pieces.

They parp on about player welfare but they are giving this guy licence to keep doing it and taking the chance that when he flings all 18 stone at someone's leg with absolutely no control, that he will get lucky and miss the knee. It's crazy behaviour from the player but even crazier from an awarding body so hell bent on sanitising the game in the name of player welfare, to let him off with this technique again.

Appealing Bell's ban was a shot to nothing from Saints I think. Unfortunate incident but they were never going to get that overturned.

It makes our job easier on Friday as Bell is a cracking attacking player and makes them tick when he comes on at loose. However, I've still got a feeling they'll turn us over unfortunately, Saints will want to lay a marker down that they're not quite done yet.

It's a cast iron certainty that Saints will come flying out of the blocks in the first set and try to swarm us. I'd say we need to win the toss and kick off to them and fight fire with fire, try to force an error.

You can usually get a feel for these derby games in the first couple of sets, we need to get off to a high tempo start and stay error free!

Wigan need to do what they've been conditioned to do by Saints over the last 5 years and that is to remain calm, patient and be as error free as possible in the face of what I'd expect will be a whirlwind start by them. We used to panic, make errors and then get picked off and bit by bit over the years, we've learned to stay composed, in the knowledge that they cannot keep that pace up for 80 minutes. We know their attack is unlikely to get us from inside their own half, so the big battle is to make sure we're not pinned on our line for 80 minutes. We've been very good at soaking up pressure, safe in the knowledge that we can hurt them from any area of the pitch but if you do too much defending because of errors and penalties, that becomes more and more difficult.

The big worry for me so far this season is that discipline. It's has been really poor and every ref is battering us on the penalty count, so it cannot just be the officials fault, we must be doing something wrong. If we can sort that, we've got a really good chance.

Weather looking mixed on Friday with a downpour forecasted around 3pm. This is unfortunate for us as I had hope we could have exploited from deep with our speed.

Fingers crossed as forecasts have been wrong in the past.