Saints trip holds no fear for Clarke
Widnes Vikings skipper Jon Clarke insists that his team’s Friday night visit to St Helens is someting that they are relishing.
The challenge of facing Nathan Brown’s men excites Clarke, and he is hoping that the Vikings can improve on their winning performance against Warrington last week.
“We don’t have any fear about going to Saints,” he said.
“We can’t wait. We’re looking forward to the challenge. They’re playing well. They had a good win against Wigan a couple of weeks ago.
“We’re under no illusions, they’re a top side, they’ve got quality players all around. We’re up for a big challenge again.
“This is a week-by-week thing for us, we’re trying to improve our performance again.
“To be honest, even though we got two points against Warrington, there’s still a lot of areas we can pick up on and improve.
“We’ll be looking to do that on Friday, and hopefully be on the right side of the result again.”
Widnes are still very much in the hunt for a play-off place, and Clarke insists that one of the aims for this season was to better last season’s points total.
“We’ve had a pretty good year. Up until sort of six or seven games ago when we had a bit of a blip, our year was outstanding,” he added.
“That we’re probably going to reach and surpass the points we were at last year is no surprise to us.
“That was probably one of our goals at the start of the year to do that, knowing that if we did that, we’d be up in and around the top eight.
“That’s still the goal for us – to get in that top eight.”
Salford are now breathing down the Vikings’ necks when it comes to making the top eight, and Clarke maintains that no other side is being taken lightly by Widnes.
“We’re definitely not looking behind us. I think Salford did us a favour against Hull KR,” he said.
“But on the other hand, Salford are going well, they’ve won three from three. So we’ve got to be careful with them.
“We’ve got to go to Saints and put a real solid performance in, knowing that if we do that, we won’t be far away.
“If we can pick two points up there, then we’ll be looking pretty good for the eight.”