Leeds Rhinos coach Brad Arthur delivers brutally honest assessment after Wigan Warriors defeat

Leeds Rhinos coach Brad Arthur delivered an open and honest assessment following his side’s 38-0 defeat at Wigan Warriors on Friday night.

The Warriors ran in seven tries to comfortably dispatch the Rhinos, with Arthur’s side being comfortably second best from start to finish.

It has left the Rhinos’ play-off hopes hanging by a thread. They need to win at Hull Kingston Rovers in the final round next week with other results going their way if they are to make the top six.

Here’s everything Arthur said in his post-match press conference at the Brick Community Stadium…

Overall assessment

“We were beaten by a way better side tonight. They dominated us physically right from the start and their 1 to 17 across the field owned their jobs and we didn’t.

“They started fast and hard, we didn’t handle that physicality and through that lack of physicality we never got into field position all night. In the first half we didn’t have one set that started in their half, we had a couple of tackle 4s and 5s into their half but that was about it.

“And in the second half we didn’t really improve much. I think we got one set down inside their half and turned it over early in the tackle count so, physically, they were just on a different level today.

“We need to make sure it’s a one-off, it’s certainly not the way we want to finish our season. I don’t know what next week means for us in terms of the results, but what it does mean is that we need to be way better than that. We need to finish our season (strong) because we’ve been way better than that but it just shows you we’ve got a bit of work to do in pre-season if we want to be physical and match that every week.”

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The Rhinos are still in the mix for the play-offs…

“That’s great but I’m not really interested in that right at this moment. We’ve got to find a way to get a better performance than that, that’s the main priority for us moving forward.”

Youngsters Alfie Edgell and Riley Lumb stood up well…

“They did a good job. Alfie hasn’t played fullback for four or five months so it was tough on him, I thought they probably kicked us to death a little bit so that’s probably an area we need to improve.”

You seemed to get a bit of a foot hold in the first half, what changed?

“We were okay physically for a period in the middle of that first half but we just couldn’t get a penalty, a six-to-go or another set on the back of those tackle 4s and 5s down there, we just needed to find a way to get another fresh set of six or a new start and maybe when it was 10-0 we could have jacked a try and it might have given us a bit more energy.”

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Was there a message to run the tackle five plays?

“Early in the piece we were kicking from our 30 or 40 metre line, and it’s very hard to try and run it from there so we had to try to break it up a little bit but they were dominating us physically. We didn’t get out of our red zone until we were kicking on our 30 or 40 and they were catching the ball in their 30 or 40 and starting their sets in good ball and it sort of snowballed from there.”

This will be the first time you’ll have to pick them up from a big defeat, how do you go about doing that?

“We’ve got to stick to what we normally do. During the week we’ll review it, be honest and move on from it and find a way with our preview, train well and we’ve still got plenty to play for. You tell me results went our way tonight but, regardless of that, we’ve got a bit of pride and we’ve played better than that and we don’t want to finish like that.”

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