By Michael Whiting

Gold Coast SUNS are near certain to run its strongest team available against GWS on Saturday after injured trio Gary Ablett, Michael Rischitelli and David Swallow flew through training on Friday morning.

All three ran strongly at Metricon Stadium before the SUNS left the Coast bound for Canberra.

Emergencies Danny Stanley, Jeremy Taylor and Matt Shaw also trained with the main group but will only come into the team if one of the trio pulls up lame.

Assistant coach Shane O'Bree said Ablett would "definitely" play after missing the past two weeks with a knee injury, and hinted he could spend more time up forward.

Rischitelli has also missed a fortnight with an ankle problem but looked good, while Swallow (ankle) ran well after not training on Wednesday.

"Dave is very strong-minded with those sort of things," O'Bree said.

"I don't think those sort of guys you have to teach [to play with pain]. He's a workhorse Dave. Sometimes you have to tell him to pull back at training."

In what SUNS coach Guy McKenna described as a "battle of the babies, battle of the boys" earlier this week, the Suns-Giants clash has been talked-down from both sides of the border.

GWS – 12 months behind the SUNS in their AFL existence – won by 13 points when the teams met in the NAB Cup in March.

McKenna said he was not worried by that result and had used the match as a fact-finding mission on his opponents.

"It was more about having a look at them close-up," McKenna said.

"Their structures, where they like to play their senior players and really get to know some of their young kids. There's going to be a massive rivalry between the 17th side and the 18th side.

"Our philosophy in that game was about getting ourselves ready for round one, not stamping our mite on GWS, that was always going to happen at round seven. They're keen to do that, we're keen to do that as well."

O'Bree said it would be a different ball-game on Saturday to the pre-season match, but played down talk of the Suns treating the game differently as favourites.

"All you can see in the papers is we're favourites compared to GWS. I don't see that as an added pressure," O'Bree said.

"It's just another great opportunity for our team who has progressed over the last two weeks.

"We've copped a bit of flak over the first six rounds and the boys have responded to that so it'll be no different either way if we win or lose, (but) we should win, yeah."