The Super League season continues on Saturday when the competition heads down to France for the first time in more than a year as the Catalans Dragons play host to the Salford Red Devils to open up their proper home campaign.
The season hasn’t gone entirely to plan for either of these two teams but the Dragons have come out with a couple of hard fought wins while the Red Devils have been beaten in both their Super League outings.
Where to watch
The match will be shown live in full on the Sky Sports Arena channel. The short build up to the game begins at 4.55pm with the match itself kicking off at 5pm UK time.
Catalans Dragons
The Catalans Dragons haven’t been anywhere near their fluent best this season but they have still been able to overcome the challenges of Hull KR and the Huddersfield Giants in the Super League as well as pushing hard to get the better of Wakefield Trinity in the Challenge Cup last week. There will be sterner tests to come for the Dragons but we should probably expect them to get better as the campaign goes along.
We can say that for a couple of reasons, the first one being not having to travel to the UK on the day of a game every other week which should bring about natural improvement and the other is that they were without a couple of key players to begin the season and have filled their squad with some younger home grown talent who will get better as their acclimatise to the league. No matter how they did it, that they have won both their matches is very much a positive for them.
Salford Red Devils
On the flip side of that, things haven’t gone to plan for the Salford Red Devils in the Super League so far, although it should be said that in St Helens and Hull FC they might well have played the two sides who will be competing in the Grand Final later in the campaign. They showed they still have plenty of attacking mite at their disposal in the Challenge Cup last week when they absolutely battered Widnes Vikings in what became a rout.
This was always going to be a work in progress sort of season for the Salford Red Devils after losing the coach who has masterminded their success in the close season and seen a couple of key players leave also. They will hope the confidence of that victory last week will give them the momentum to kick their Super League campaign into life but might have drawn the short straw to be the first team to oppose Catalans in France.
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Team News
Catalans Dragons will welcome Michael McIlorum back from the suspension which was carried over from last season. He will go straight in at hooker to immediately strengthen the French outfit. Joel Tomkins is still missing though.
Salford Red Devils have a couple of gun players back in their ranks in the form of Kevin Brown and Elijah Taylor, the latter a tackling machine in the early stages of the season. Krisnan Inu is one of the players who misses out here.
Betting
Salford Red Devils have conceded 64 points in their opening two matches which is the thing which will have annoyed them more than anything. They are always going to put points on the board given the quality of their halves and back line but they are not going to achieve any of the goals they have for the season if they can’t stop leaking points. That defence is going to be severely tested here you would think as well.
The Catalans Dragons haven’t really hit top form in attack yet this season but the addition of Michael McIlorum to lead them around the pitch from dummy half will undoubtedly help with that and I expect a much better showing from them as an attacking unit here. That makes me think that the 45.5 points line, which looks a little low for a Salford Red Devils match anyway, can be covered by two pretty attack minded teams.
Tips
WON – Back Over 45.5pts for a 3/10 stake at 1.83 with Boylesports
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