Wigan Warriors: Liam Farrell says the defeat to St Helens was a 'tough one to swallow'

Matty Peet’s side were defeated 22-4 in the Good Friday Derby at the Totally Wicked Stadium.

Farrell states he is disappointed with the result, but is able to see some positives.

He said: “It was a tough one to swallow. We were there for large parts of the first half and put ourselves in decent positions. We could’ve done without the score before the break, that would’ve been a better reflection.

“Coming out in the second half, we probably didn’t match that intensity we had. We lost Tommy (Leuluai) and lost Pow (Sam Powell) for 10 minutes, which put us in a difficult position.

“Against a good team like Saints you can’t allow them to have the opportunities they had, so it became a comfortable victory for them, but I don’t think the score reflects the effort we put in.

“It looks as if they were completely in control of the game, but that wasn’t the case in the first 30 minutes. If things had swung differently, and we had scored early doors or if a couple of calls had gone our way, that would’ve made a big difference.

“The effort was there in the second half, but that was probably done as individuals rather than a team. That’s probably down to losing two halfbacks, but there’s a lot of positives to take out of it.

“We’ve come into this year with a bit of a new squad and we wanted to see where we were at. We have shown we can compete with the best, but they did run away with it at the end, so we’ve got a few things to fix up.

“Saints were probably better than us on the day. They played for the full 80 minutes and we didn’t, so we’ve got to be better and have that intensity for longer.

“We are in the chasing pack at the moment, we want to be the best team in the comp. At the moment, we have failed against the top two teams, so we know we’ve a bit more work, but we’re happy to try and improve to get better.

“The lucky thing for us is we get to play them again in a few weeks.”

Farrell says there are positives and negatives to having a short turnaround of games, with their next test coming against Wakefield on Easter Monday.

“There’s two sides to it,” he added.

“There will be a lot of sore bodies, but at the same time the lads will want to put some wrongs, right, so we will be looking forward to it.

“We want to get down to the DW and put a good performance in and get back to winning ways.

“Wakefield can be a dangerous team on their day when they throw the ball around, they are a hard team to handle. We have to make sure we turn up with the right mindset.”