Or give Watkins some decent ball.

Bunches of players providing sudden and miraculous returns to action at key points during a season after extracting the urine during the regular season league fixtures is nothing new at Leeds. The club and the players crafted this method into an art form twice from 5th and should have done the same from 6th but screwed up in the 6th V 7th home play-off against WBFFFSLR.

This particular art form also played key roles during several CC rounds when certain players suddenly recovered their fitness levels.

It'll be interesting to see what players Leeds have available this Friday.

Bet Achurch plays (sorry, "is selected", he hasn't played all season).

Watch the first 40 from Friday. Can't catch a cold

Mobility is an interesting wider point. Won't get into the 17 v Hudd point but think we have a serious, hard to fix issue of lack of mobility/pace in current squad and in particular the pack. We know achurch is leaving and have jjb, ferres and falloon out of contract at year end. At start of year I would have thought this would be the last year of JJB but he has stormed back. If he gets another 1 year deal we have lots of slow back row men.


Stevie ward will help but if you compare our pack to Wigan the lack of athleticism is a big problem in my view. In back row they have some real pace Farrell, Tomkins , Bateman and isa. Their props are also far quicker. A lot has been written about some of the limitations of Wigan props but as all round players I think. Flower is a fair bit better than any Leeds prop except cuthbo. I think Crosby is also a shade better. Sutton is a real prospect and although clubb and in particular tautai make errors they are all mobile. As a collective our pack is way down in comparison. Suspect the hope is Walters can improve his overall game as he has clearly been picked from RU for his athletic potential.

Add in slowing halves and I believe it is a key factor In our low scoring attack.
For me it also means opposition teams see limited threats from us. This is over simplified but stop hardaker and Watkins getting clear and you can probably catch all the rest.


Some interesting choices for recruitment and retention lie ahead but not sure any quick fixes.

Yet with pretty much similar squad, probably slower because of Sinfield, Peacock and Leuluai we scored the most points last year.

As for the rest, one of the big issues with RL today is that we end having picking utility athletes over guys who can play a certain role.

Is your reliable source called Horses Mouth by any coincidence?

Just a little common sense I think.

Well, Moon, Mags & Delaney still missing. 8 out of arguably the first choice 17 not fit to play, again!

We're just keeping players fresh ready for the middle 8's campaign. They've won everything else, might as well go for a new 'league' title and win the middle 8's

Which is why pace matters.

How many of McGuire and Burrow's tries were scored backing up breaks and half-breaks of each other and others. A sizeable number for both.

Sutcliffe made a break looked inside and found Lilley. Sure, he could and should have given Watkins a walk-in but having pace on both sides should have been a try either way.

After cheaply handing over a lot of ball on early plays on the Hudds line, that opportunity was the one Leeds had to take. If we could have had a 2 score half time lead that would probably had been enough to squeeze home.

Could still see one of Moon or Mags tomorrow i am informed

We have been spoiled. In their younger years they were both extremely quick. Mags in particular had real pace. Burrow still has considerable gas, for me it's why he still causes defences trouble and deserves a place in the team.
The one and only real advantage of being small on a rugby pitch is being quicker off the mark than bigger guys. A lot of big men can really shift once they get going (Ian Kirke is one example of that), but small guys can be quick over 10-20 metres. There is not a lot of benefit to being small playing rugby beyond that. As a small guy I can speak from experience.

Hearing that Moon will be involved

Early in their careers when they were scoring tries for fun backing up breaks, defences were very poor at tracking back and disrupting the break. Now wingers, centres, second rows etc track back and get in the way of passes, or as in this case, to tackle the man receiving the pass.
That rarely happened when McGuire and Burrow were Sutcliffe & Lilley's age.

I read GH's comments on injuries with interest. He seemed to be suggesting that the game itself was causing injuries and that Leeds have been fielding injured players because they have to. I call bull on both counts.

Firstly, SL is nowhere near as physically tough as the NRL, and yet we're not seeing injury crises at any NRL sides as bad as Leeds. SL sides playing more games, but with smaller squads is more the point.

Players who haven't been able to train but having to play hurt is more the problem, leading to them re-injuring themselves or simply not recovering properly. Maybe even picking up new injuries as a result of having to modify what they do.

When we had an A Team league and sides had a bad run with injuries, they could pick a game where they thought they could get away with picking a bunch of reserve graders, giving players a week more to recover. A genuine feeder system would work the same way.

Sadly the league went for a cheap, halfway house solution with just a few players in a feeder team, with lots of restrictions on numbers etc.

Leeds have got away with this because we've had some incredibly resilient (lucky) core of players with respect to injury. Almost all of our key players over the last decade have escaped long-term injuries during the season (I can't think of when we lost two or more for extended periods at the same time except for the back end of last year), and almost every time we've played a final we've had most of the squad intact, or at least as intact as our opponents.

Bottom line is we've been taking a risk running small squads. Leeds have generally done well out of it - far better than some teams. So I don't have much sympathy if the system GH helped put in place bites us on the . If GH wants a fix, bring back reserve grade.

I think that's the way it might seem but we have had plenty of injury issues - in some cases a lot more than other clubs. We have just handled it well up to now.
End of 2010 we lost Peacock and Mags (and Burgess) with serious, long term injuries. Brent Webb and Toopi, JJB for various, and I remember one game against Cas when we had Webb at half and most of the team missing (although some of those were due to international duty).
It's true, we have managed to have most key players fit come GF time, but so have our opposition.

Fully agree about reserve grade. It's not just about having a pool of players it's about developing younger players in adult rugby rather than the loan/dual reg system which I don't believe works well for young players.

Moon was down to be involved in the Salford game and that was 4 weeks ago. It amazes me how long injuries take to clear up in a losing team. If we were flying high some of these injuries would be classed as slight knocks and players would be declaring themselves fit to return.

To be fair Hetherington is saying the sport should've been investigating why these injuries are happening, what type etc and he's right. As a sport we're p/ss poor at this kind of thing. For instance there was a piece on Sky Sports recently about concussion in sport and while it mentioned RL it focussed on other sports because we don't record the stats around concussion.
We have a small pool of players and the sport is being affected by having too many of them out injured, so we should be finding out what's going on and why.

I agree part of it is probably the small squads issue but part is probably due to the wrestle in the tackle too. If we compiled injury stats as a sport then we could see whether players are receiving the same types of injuries. Also, are players coming back too soon? Are they receiving top diagnosis/treatment/rehab etc etc.

I don't think it's a mystery why the likes of Ablett and Delaney are getting injured. Some players have been playing 1st team since they were in their teens, you only get so many games before the body starts wearing out. Hall may only be what 26? but he's in his 8/9th season, probably same for Briscoe. Mags is just old, Moon has been around for a while and is due a few tweeks and pulls. Cuthbertson is 30 and plays prop.
We have a mature squad and it's showing it's age.
I believe that any big physical weaknesses get found out early in a career - Watkins, Sutty, Ward for example have all had knees blow early and will come back from that (Ward has had his shoulders, a little like JJB had early in his career), but eventually guys get to a certain number of games and injuries become more likely. Someone in the middle of that would be Singleton, he's been around a while but not racked up lots of games yet - he's in his prime and fit. Some guys just never get injured for whatever reason. Way they are built, the type of game they play - all factors. My guess would be that they are just in the sweet spot for weight and ligament/tendon/bone strength, and they have been lucky along with it.

There does appear to a rise in the number of cruciate knee injuries in recent years - could this be related to modern tackling techniques?

Yeah, they'll be certain factors along the way but at the end of the day can be simply down to luck/unlucky. Sinfield started early, would be right up as top tackler many years before even though he wasn't a big loose forward and took some big hits too but never really had a serious injury, just a couple of 3/4 weekers. Then you have someone like Gary Wheeler who seems to break down as soon as he steps onto a pitch.

I'm sure it's a factor, along with the size and power of modern players, but the current techniques of delaying getting the ball carrier to the floor for as long as possible will likely be a major factor too.

Which is why we need detailed info on injuries in the game, so that we can spot certain trends and deal with them with them where appropriate.

Definitely a factor. Three men in a wrestle is going to add to knee stress.
My own view as someone who has had 2-3 serious knee injuries (one about as bad as it gets), is that summer rugby and harder grounds are also responsible. If the ground is soft and has give then it's much less likely that you will trap or "catch" a foot in the ground which leads to less chance of twisting or rotating a knee. When we played in winter it always seemed like an Australian thing, I believe they did pioneer the reconstructive surgery down under.
I dislocated my right knee twice - both in pre-season training on hard ground and split a cartilidge in September on a hard pitch with long grass. Ironically my worst knee injury was playing in a bog, but the problem was the same, the ground was very wet clay and drying out, my foot got stuck and I couldn't move it - until my knee snapped.