Brad O’Neill makes disciplinary admission as hooker discusses lessons learned from Good Friday defeat

That’s the thoughts of hooker Brad O’Neill, who was one of the stand-out performers at the Totally Wicked Stadium and believes his Wigan side will be better off with some lessons learned from the brutal encounter.

The Warriors fell to their first defeat of the season with a 12-4 score against Paul Wellens’ Saints, with Wigan having finished the game with 12 men.

Liam Byrne was sent off for a high tackle on Mark Percival and a 4-2 lead was shortly after shifted as Tommy Makinson and Konrad Hurrell scored to end Wigan’s long unbeaten Super League run that dated back to last July.

“It was a tough game all the way through,” O’Neill said.

“We turned up with the right intent and the right focus, but obviously we’ve come out on the wrong side of the result.

“There’s nothing you can do about the yellow and red cards, it’s about how we reacted and I thought we reacted quite well. But in the end we’ve come away on the wrong side.

“It’s still early days. We can take learnings from that game and we feel like we’re still on the right path. It’s tough to take the loss, but we’ll bounce back.”

Wigan gave away eight penalties but managed to hold their opponents to just two points - a penalty conversion from Percival - until the sending off midway through the second half.

Tyler Dupree was also sent to the sin-bin for a leading elbow on Matty Lees in the first 40.

“Learning how to cope with the cards is probably a big learning that we can take,” O’Neill continued.

“Learning that we can’t keep giving yardage penalties or making errors, we can’t do it in these big games.

"We had to defend a lot, and although we pride ourselves on that defence, we can’t keep doing it.

“We can’t keep giving penalties. I feel like if we can fix that, that will improve our performances.

“I feel like we can take loads from the game, but it’s still early in the year. There’s a long way to go and I feel like we’re on the right path.”