Glimpse of Wigan fear; Rebuilding the legend: The two giants of rugby confront their rivals on Saturday knowing only a win will do

Dave Hadfield looks at the deposed league kings forced to lower their sights

Wigan have the earliest possible opportunity on Saturday to show that last season's relative fall from grace was a mere blip. A visit to St Helens in the fourth round of the Silk Cut Challenge Cup - a trophy filched from them, like the Super League Championship, by Saints last year - gives Wigan the chance to banish much of the gloom felt by supporters virtually force-fed with success for the last decade.

Defeat, on the other hand, would put a cloud of depression over the season before it has properly begun. The spectre of a club in decline would stalk them through the Super League campaign, which starts next month. This week they unveiled the fourth of their close-season signings - the second to be plucked from the relative obscurity of the reserve grade ranks at the Auckland Warriors.

Of course, the 21-year-old second-row Stuart Lester might be a world- beater, but the acquisition of players like him and his compatriot, David Murray, denotes a lowering of the sights. As one former Wigan player put it: "They might turn out to be good players, but at one time Wigan wouldn't have been signing Auckland's reserve full-back. They would have been signing their first grade full-back."

Wigan have at least taken the immediate financial pressure off by agreeing a deal with Dave Whelan, the multi-millionaire owner of Wigan Athletic, which will pay off their debts and allow them to continue playing at a much-improved Central Park.

But the old, swashbuckling days of freebooting their way around the world, plundering the very best, are long gone. In terms of their playing strength, the tide is still flowing against them. Of their players recently returned from rugby union, Jason Robinson is due to leave for Australia in June and the financial blow of a loss at Knowsley Road next Saturday would make it desperately difficult to hang on to Va'aiga Tuigamala.

That, in turn, would further agitate a restive public. And, as another - current - Wigan player said: "We've got the most fickle fans in the game. We lost three matches last season and they were after our blood. God knows what it would be like if we had a really bad run."

Three matches, yes; but those knocked them out of the Cup and reduced to second place in the Championship. And that, in the context of the last decade at Wigan, is counted as an inexcusable failure.

Whether Wigan can start to write off last season's deficit on Saturday depends very much on the strength of the team they are able to field. The immediate legacy of the financially-driven series of loans to union clubs is that neither Gary Connolly nor Henry Paul is certain to be available. And, of course, the returnees who do play will be scrutinised with extra suspicion.

One encouragement for Wigan is that Saints have problems of their own, particularly over Bobbie Goulding, who has reacted with pique to the fact that he is not the club's best-paid player, when it is perfectly clear to him that he should be. Goulding has a case - and so do others whose stock has risen during Saints' highly successful last 12 months. But he does not appear to have anywhere else to go and will presumably play on Saturday. How he will play is another matter.

The one certainty is that if the club gave everyone what they think they are worth they would soon be as debt-ridden as Wigan became. As the St Helens chairman, Eric Ashton, says: "When we won the double last season, people told me that it would bring problems - problems with money and problems with players. And it has."

Wigan know all about that syndrome. What they cannot countenance is any more contact with that other flock of troubles that come to roost on the stand roof when success is snatched away.