Ticket bought middle of South stand . Can't wait!

The club have just announced over 17k tickets sold so far.

West Stand - less than 100 left. (WS1 & WS10 yet to be released)
South Stand - less than 200 left. (SS1 yet to be released)
East Stand - less than 500 left. (ES1 & ES10 yet to be released)
North Stand - Gaps starting to appear in central blocks.


All bodes well for a full house come February.

The reaction to tickets going on sale has been outstanding. To shift 17,000 in a couple of weeks and around Christmas time has been some effort. I think Rads himself had it right in saying he expects fans of all clubs to attend as they’ll want to see this Penrith team in the flesh and especially Cleary. It’s going to be a special night.

Tremendous effort, hopefully over the next few weeks demand will mean the club open up the "end" blocks for sale

Will be the highest WCC crowd in a decade when over 30k watched Sydney v Wigan. Under 14k attended Penrith v Saints and 16k attended Saints v Sydney in 2020.

All I can say is Wigan are the biggest draw either here or in Australia than our little rivals.

The club have just announced 18k tickets sold.

Checked last night there were only 60 seats left in the West Stand and these were dotted all over the place.

SS1 opened up for sale

Hope they have some seats available after Jan pay day. Xmas is very expensive, especially with an xmas day baby (albeit it 14 years ago)

A potential sell out will be great but I can't get over the nagging feeling that we're in a bit of trouble with this one. It feels like Penrith will really prioritise this given the commitment to fly over here, the fact that its a trophy they haven't yet won and the possibility of being the first NRL team to lose in successive WCC's. Even just mentioning the game in some of their press releases and retweeting the crowd figures wouldn't be something you would normally see the NRL clubs do with this fixture. St Helens maybe caught them a little cold last year and ground it out in horrendous conditions - I think we'll see a much improved version in Feb.

There is no way we’ll catch them off guard. To beat them will be one hell of an ask and Saints result only make it harder for us IMO. They (Saints fans) can like it or not but Penrith treated that fixture last year with real arrogance and I don’t think they’ll do it again. I actually came across the highlights on YouTube the other day of the Saints game and the NRL site had titled them ‘Pre season Round 2’. That didn’t mean Penrith saw it like that but it tells a story of what the general feeling was over there.

I reckon we've got 30 to 60 mins max before we see a Saints fan pop-up to refute everything you've said. They can't help it.

I don’t get why it’s so insulting to them. If Penrith play at their best against us, are totally switched on and we don’t get the bounce of the ball, they’ll beat us and so they should. They treated that Saints game pretty much as a friendly but that doesn’t take away from the achievement. A team spending 4 times what you can, playing on home soil and being lauded as possibly the best Australian team of all time, should still win the game, even taking it lightly. It was an amazing victory for Saints, no doubt about it.

Spot on and, like you said earlier, facing them this time is even more of a challenge. They won't be caught off guard twice, so it will take a herculean effort to turn them over. I'd go as far as to say that, if we played them away, it would be almost impossible.

The hope for us are the exits of Crichton and Leniu but any team with a spine including Edwards, Luai, Cleary and Yeo is going to be a monstrous challenge. Add in Leota and JFH and we’ll need everything to fall our way. It’s going to be a great night regardless of the result and you just never know what can happen.

Stopping Leota, Fisher-Harris and Liam Martin in the first 10/15 minutes will be crucial. They set the physical tone for Penrith for the spine to play off the back.

Met them three physically. Move up quick/kick pressure on Cleary. To’o is the most dangerous outside back, similar to Makinson. I’d bomb him to restrict him taking a proper carry.

As you’ve said Leniu is a big loss, they should have too much experience coming off the bench but knowing them they’ll be very good young players.

Should be a great game, Panthers are 4 point favourites with the bookies and that’s probably about right.

Should be low scoring.

So looking at our fixtures prior to Penrith on 24th Feb at the moment we have:

26th Jan - Wakefield A (Friendly)
4th Feb - Hull FC A (Testimonial)
17th Feb - Cas A (SL Rd 1)

So, surely we go strong from the off playing almost full strength at Wakey then full strength at Hull, obviously we will at Cas. I'd even suggest an additional friendly needs to be arranged for 10th/11th Feb. Too long a gap from the Hull game to the Cas game to keep us on point.

By the way, not seen anything relating to Penrith friendlies yet, anything happening there yet? Fully expect a SL team to provide a match and training venue prior to playing us.

Big block of tickets just disappeared from N2, be fantastic if Penrith have organised a supporters trip

20k barrier broken now, should be a great occasion and hopefully a full house under the floodlights.

Are the club allowing the flags to go back above the South Stand again? Wonder if the club themselves have anything big planned apart from the standard pyrotechnics...?

Absolute nonsense mate and you're doing us a massive disservice there. Watch the game again and watch their players reaction to their late try and their reaction to our drop goal. They cared, a lot. To say they treated it as a friendly or took it lightly is just plain wrong and is simply an attempt to play down our achievement, regardless of you saying otherwise.

By the way, 20,000 tickets sold 6 weeks before the game is a fantastic response from the Wigan fans. I'd be made up if that was Saints, fair play.

That would be a problem, the TW Stadium doesn’t hold that many

Haha touche!

The reactions late in a game aren’t going to tell you as much as the general malaise in their play for the first hour did or the fact they decided to rest up Dylan Edwards and Liam Martin. They thought they just had to turn up and you saw the panic in them late on when they realised they were in trouble. It probably didn’t help them the NRL heading it as a R2 pre season game and when they looked around the stands and saw the lowest crowd in donkeys years, that can’t have get the juices flowing either.

As I say, it doesn’t take away from Saints achievement, it was absolutely huge and the disadvantages they overcame were far greater than the fact Penrith took the game extremely lightly.

Players don't react like that if they were treating it as a friendly, that's my point. You're implying they didn't care about the result either way. They clearly did.