Bulldogs confirmed their local bragging rights with a strong 18-7 victory on that occasion, but since then CSU have only tasted defeat once.

On offer for the winner tomorrow is third spot on the ladder, and in Bulldogs’ case, they can go a long way to actually securing that position with a victory given that they are already two points clear of CSU.

“This game certainly means a lot, both teams know exactly where they stand and in our case we still have games against Narromine and Dubbo Kangaroos to come – we are confident we can do some damage in those matches but we’d like to make things easier on ourselves with a win this week,” Smith said.

“They are playing well and will be fired up, and we will certainly be very fired up and looking forward to it.

“Last time we met them was only in the third game of the season and we were playing well, they probably weren’t up to scratch at that stage but since then they have gone from strength to strength and they are a big threat. We’ve got to play well.”

Bulldogs have been strong in their recent outings, including an impressive 47-22 win over Forbes last week in which their attack sparkled.

That lustre will be diminished somewhat by the absence of injured Bart Bogart tomorrow but Bulldogs still boast plenty of weapons and Smith says they hope to fire as many shots as possible.

“In the last couple of weeks we have worked on regaining confidence and last Saturday we scored all our tries through the backs,” he explained.

“We know our forwards can dominate scrums and help us put CSU on the back foot, so we will be trying to do just that and make it hard for their back line – one thing is for sure, it should be a great battle between the two sets of backs.”

Representative prop Chris Plunkett returns to the starting side at the expense of Andrew Warren while Shaun Healey will come in for Michael Weekes at number 8.