The Canberra Raiders and North Queensland Cowboys have run out resounding winners in Friday night's double-header of Week 2 in the NRL pre-season challenge.

With so many fringe, reserve grade and jersey flegg players running around, it was tough to know exactly where to look or what to take out of either result, but there are still plenty of key talking points.

Here they are.

3. If we are going to Vegas, then those teams must play trials against each other

The NRL are heading into the third year of the Las Vegas experiment, and there is talk other locations will be trialed in the coming seasons.

The issue is that it creates discrepencies in where teams are up to in their pre-season.

To have the Cowboys up 44-0 with their full strength side against a team of kids did nobody any favours on Friday evening.

The Cowboys haven't had a proper hit out, and the Panthers kids will, while maybe better for the run, have some scars to take out of the game.

It serves no one any favours though, and realistically, all that's going to happen is someone will get injured when the game is dead and buried.

That's always a risk in pre-season, but when no one is getting anything out of it, the risk seems all the more silly.