Adrian Lam was relieved to see common sense prevail this week as Leigh Leopards’ Ricky Leutele avoided further disciplinary punishment by the RFL’s Match Review Panel. Leutele was shown a yellow card during Friday night’s game with St Helens at the Leigh Sports Village for a tackle that many people felt was perfectly acceptable.
It was a decision that nearly proved costly for Leigh, who needed to win in order to guarantee a spot in the play-offs, with Saints scoring two tries while the centre was off the field. Fortunately for the club, they managed to get the win they deserved to set up a tie with Salford Red Devils in the first week of the Super League play-offs.
The club will have been sweating on the outcome of the disciplinary review on Monday afternoon, with a ban ruling Leutele out of the trip to Salford at the very least. However, Lam, Leutele and everyone at Leigh will have allowed themselves to breathe a sigh of relief when the news came through that no action was being taken due to the contract being ‘secondary and low force’.
“Yeah I don’t even think it should have been a penalty to be honest,” Lam told Serious About Rugby League. “I’ve looked at it about 100 times now and there’s no contact at all there.
“I felt that it was unfair that it was a penalty and even time in the sin-bin, it potentially cost us two tries and nearly the game.”
Leigh Leopards are one of the form teams heading into the play-offs, having won all but two of their last 12 games and as such, they’ll make the short trip to the Salford Community Stadium with heaps of confidence.
“We’ve been on a bit of a run now for half the season so into the finals with an opportunity,” Lam added. “I think we were one of eight or one out of nine at the start of the season.
“It’s a similar picture to last year but in reverse. We finished the season last year after the Challenge Cup with one out of nine. We’ve earned the right now and it was just good to have that really important game at home as well in front of our sold out stadium. It was a game we needed on the physical side of things with the finals looming.”
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Mark rowlands
September 24, 2024 at 9:02 am
As all games now have a VR at them , the cause of action should be quite simple if the VR intervenes and thinks it’s a sin bin , that should be the end of it and the punishment is playing with 12 men for 10 minutes, it doesn’t seem right that Leigh were punished on the night and then would of been punished again with a suspension for the play-offs .
We as fans of RL want to watch full strength teams
Up the giants