ALL 23 games of the regular season have now been played, as Super League XX reaches the stage where the “new era” we were told about at the start of the season begins to kick in.

The top eight teams will see their points carried over to the next stage, where they’ll play seven further games and battle it out for a place in the top four.

Despite there being 14 points still to play for, it appears that three of the top four are already decided. Leeds Rhinos top the table after this initial stage of the competition and will almost certainly take one of the semi-final places.

They ended their season with a 36-22 victory over eighth-place Catalans Dragons as Tom Briscoe, who’d been out since March with a shoulder injury, announced his return with a hat-trick of tries.

It’s a similar story for St Helens and Wigan who are just a point or two behind the leaders and it’ll be a surprise if either of them fail to secure a semi-final berth.

In their final games of the regular season, they both managed to see off Hull sides, with Wigan beating Hull FC by 48 points to 12 on Thursday and St Helens defeating Hull KR 52-12 a day later.

Warriors winger Joe Burgess added another try to his season’s tally, meaning he remained ahead of Hull’s Tom Lineham atop the try-scoring charts at the end of this first phase.

The defeats meant little to the Hull sides whose fates were decided last week. Rovers will slog it out in the middle-eight qualifiers, as they look to maintain their Super League status, and while Hull FC finished in the top eight, they face an uphill struggle in the form of an eight-point gap between themselves and the all-important top four.

The fourth spot in the table is occupied by Huddersfield Giants, who’ve racked up 28 points to take with them into the Super 8s.

Their 34-24 win at home to Wakefield took them two points ahead of Castleford who lost at home to Warrington by 44 points to 6.

This means Warrington are now just two points behind Castleford in sixth and five points away from taking Huddersfield’s place in the top four.

Elsewhere, Widnes beat Salford by 21 points to 20, in a taster for what looks set to be an entertaining middle-eight competition.

The two sides will be joined by Hull KR and Wakefield from the current Super League crop and Championship clubs Leigh, Bradford, Sheffield and Halifax.

The middle-eight qualifiers will see each team play seven games, playing each other once, having had their points total reset to zero.

Leigh Centurions topped the Championship table at the end of their regular season and will be tipped by many as the side who could challenge the Super League clubs for a place in the top division next season.

Their recent epic 36-36 draw against Bradford at Odsal was another preview of the type of entertaining match-ups we could see in this novel part of the new competition structure.