WIGAN-born Stefan Ratchford will enjoy a trip to the DW Stadium tonight but is determined to send Warrington Wolves into the play-offs on a high.

Wolves head into the final Super League game of the season looking to boost their chances of a home play-off tie by beating rivals Wigan Warriors.

But Ratchford, who began his career at amateurs Wigan St Patricks, knows the home fans will create an intimidating atmosphere in Round 27.

“It’s always nice to play Wigan at Wigan,” said the 26-year-old, now in his third season with Wolves since signing from Salford Red Devils. “It’s a great place to play and the atmosphere is unreal, so that’s one of the big things.

“Even when I played for Salford there it was always a special ground to play at with the atmosphere created.

“It comes down to this game and we are on the same points, so it’s going to be a massive game just to see where you are going to finish.”

However, the versatile back is taking the positives from Wolves’ tough finish to the season, which included a draw with Huddersfield and rout of St Helens.

“It helps you on your way,” he added. “You’ve got to get that mentality with these big games and we’ve had Huddersfield, Saints and now Wigan.

“You want to prepare for these games as if they are play-off games, they are real tough tests and we can take the positives, look at battling hard and know how to win these games.”

And Ratchford is hoping to hit the play-offs on form to give Wolves their best chance of putting right successive Grand Final losses.

“It’s something we want to do,” he explained. “We want to get back there and put things right from the past couple of years, but we’re not at that stage yet, we’ve just got to focus.

“They are three big games that we’ve had to finish, we’ve just got to take it week by week and then we’ll go from there.”

Wolves will be hoping to take the momentum from a 39-12 success at Langtree Park into Tonight’s clash, a performance that impressed Ratchford.

“We prepared as well as we could and went to Saints expecting to win, but we expect to win every week, that’s the way we play,” said the England international.

“The way we went about it was really impressive, the way we started was really impressive but we lost two key players for us – the boys really pulled together and put in a massive performance.”

Those key players were Simon Grix and Ben Westwood, who Ratchford said the team were intent on putting in a big second-half performance for.

“We lost Grix, who’s a massive character in our squad, and then Bennie Westwood not long after, so to lose them two it was a big blow,” he added.

“But we spoke about it at half time, we’d performed well for 40 minutes and that was half a job done.

“We didn’t want to waste it in the second 40 so we had to pull together for the two boys that we lost and I think we did that quite well.”