Well done Joe Cobb. Gives a try instead of bottling it to the vr.

Leeds are in tough place at the moment. For a start they had 10 players who probably would be in their top 17 missing. No club in the world is going to cope it that.

Yesterday for Leeds was typical for a team at the bottom of the table and playing without confidence, when you're there nothing seems to go for you. Looking at the first half of DM manages to keep his fingertips on the ball and JJB finds a way to get the ball down you have a different story.

I watched it on catch up, fast forwarding through bits, but heard Hemmings rabbiting on about how Leeds had suffered terrible disruption just before kick off, without knowing what had happened. I thought Leeds' coach must have crashed (not Mac, that's already happened) with several fatalities, but couldn't work out who additionally was missing, apart from Burrow.

For me the remarkable thing is the catastrophic collapse of form in Watkins and Hardaker. Last year these two were the first names on the team sheet for England threequarters. Both are that rarity in English RL: not just fast and evasive, but big enough to compete with antipodean backs. True athletes, as opposed to the increasingly small men we seem to produce in abundance and then claim are international standard.

Yet this year it's not the case that Hardaker and Watkins are playing well in a team playing badly, it's more that they are individually disastrous. Watkins seems to grease his hands before taking the field, and barely looks for the ball. While Hardaker's performance was summed up for me by his atrocious cowardice when Sam Isa scored his try from a kick through. Hardaker and Isa were an equal distance from the rolling ball, and every defending player would have known that he needed to dive for that ball to either ground it or bat it away. Yet Hardaker deliberately slowed, refused to dive, and effectively gifted Isa a free try. Shocking.

There's a serious malaise there, and one has to ask if McDermott is the man to address it.

Me too, i switched on just before they kicked off and i thought we had another half dozen from the original list of absentees missing the way Eddie was talking!

In reality it was burrow and Garbutt missing. We have Sutcliffe out but he has looked lost all year so far and we have had McGuire, the club captain return to compensate.Out of the others who are on the injured list, we had Hall, Briscoe, Ablett and Moon its hard to include Ward as he has been long term since the play offs last year and Delaney is on his last legs even when supposedly fit and playing.

There are players there that would make a big difference but Wigan and Cas have had similar lists yet are coping just fine. Wigan had a fair few themselves yesterday, are out of form yet still in the play offs and stuck 40 on us. The excuses need to stop and the group need to look at themselves and stop looking for reasons and finding solutions, until they do the debacle will go on.

True, for Hardaker and Watkins the skills, speed and athleticism is still there but there mental state has fallen off a cliff this season, a large portion of this I suspect will be down to lack of leadership (a la Sinfield + Peacock) this season, if you look at the senior players of McQuire, Burrow and JJB only the latter seems to show any grit or determination of a natural leader. Whats alarming is the experienced overseas players seem to be taking a back seat in all this and just going along with the malaise which is putting more pressure on the younger players.
I don't think McDermott is helping with the malaise, he seems to be in a trance in seeing acceptable positives and still has hopes of a grand final, when he should be having gradual objectives of getting to 11th, 10th, 9th, 8th place etc.