Matt Peet has warning for Super League rivals

Wigan Warriors laid down a real marker yesterday with a comprehensive win over fellow 2022 Super League semi-finalists Salford Red Devils defeating them 32-4 with Bevan French and Abbas Miski notching braces.

Speaking after the game, coach Matt Peet was very pleased with things:

“I think it was a good day for us, I think we ticked some boxes in getting some minutes into certain players, opportunities for others and we managed to get everyone some game time that we planned.

“Particularly at the start of the game there were some good signs but we understand that it is a pre-season game and in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t mean a great deal but as far as our goals for today we can be happy.”

The fixture of course celebrated Sam Powell’s career in his testimonial and Peet paid tribute to him: “A good day, I thought the Club did a good job of Robin Park again – the fans turned out in decent numbers and I thought Salford played their part as well in applauding him after the game.

“Within the Club he [Sam] gets a lot of credit so it’s nice for him and his family to be able to celebrate what has been a great career. I think that’s the big one for Sam, that he gets to have all his family here today and we played well too.”

From a player at one end of his Wigan to players who debuted in Jake Wardle and Toby King, Peet described them as “excellent”: “I was made up for him [Jake Wardle] and Toby [King] actually. There’s always a lot of eyes on new players, they were the two today and I thought they were both excellent, if we can get that from them when the season starts then they’ll certainly add something to the team, in attack and defence I thought they both committed themselves really well.”

This comes as warned that Wigan have plenty of “different threats” which were there to see yesterday:

“I think you can see that we want to play, we expressed ourselves with the ball – potentially overplayed our hand at times but I’d rather us be that way and back up in solid defence that play within ourselves. We’ve got a lot of different threats within the team and if we can come together all year then we’re going to be difficult to contain with the ball, but it’s very early days.”

“There was some nice touches, nice pieces of play from them but I also just thought that the intensity in our defence didn’t drop. Against a good attacking team in Salford, I thought you couldn’t tell that it was a younger team.

“Potentially with the ball we lost a bit of shape but defensively our effort was great from the young lads when they came on – all credit to them and they’ve worked so hard during pre-season. I thought they looked fit and strong today.”