WAKEFIELD coach Chris Chester said yesterday that he is having to deal with raised expectations after finding his side cast in the unfamiliar role of favourites.

Trinity, who finished bottom of the pile in 2015, only narrowly missed out on the Super League semi-finals in 2017 and got the new season off to a tremendous start with a 28-6 win at Hull KR last Friday.

They lost both their opening two fixtures last year but are strongly fancied to make it two wins in a row when they host Salford tonight and Chester is delighted his side are now seen as genuine challengers.

“We’ve changed that perception and now we’ve got a difficult task of managing that expectation,” Chester said.

“We’ve been favourites the last couple of games and it’s all relatively new to us.

“But we’re enjoying the respect we’ve been given from opposition teams, it’s certainly a nicer position to be in than it was 12 months ago and we’d like to go two from two.

“But no-one is getting carried away. The season isn’t won in the first round, but we want to try and get four wins from our first five games. If we do that, it sets us up really nicely.

“The start is really important. We don’t want to chase our tails. We had to do it the hard way last year.

“We’ve just got to make sure we’re not complacent, we want to make this place a fortress.”

Salford will be looking to bounce back from their opening-round 40-12 defeat by Wigan and Chester believes they are an underrated team.

“They’ve changed the way they play this year,” he said,. “They’ve a big set of forwards and a fantastic half-back in Robert Lui who I really admire.

“They caused Wigan a lot of problems and they gave us a real tough game last time they came down here.”