It’s been the talk of the whole rugby league fraternity this week, but Leeds head coach Richard Agar praised Luke Gale for the way in which he battled back to steer his side to victory.
Gale and Agar had had a disagreement in a team meeting, with the halfback later acknowledging his “unprofessional” attitude, but Agar couldn’t have spoken more highly of his former captain.
“We’ve had a strong working relationship for a long time and I’m not going to say that it wasn’t difficult for me and him but as a club and team we uphold standards and he wavered from them,” Agar said.
“We dealt with it last week, moving on is easy – I understand why it’s a story in the media but it has been a fairly straightforward one for us and I thought he had a good performance tonight.
“I understand the speculation about his future but we’ve dealt with it and Luke is absolutely integral for us and we need the best out of Luke, as a halfback and kicker and how he is as a person, he will continue to be a strong leader.”
Agar opened up on what he felt was a game of two halves.
“I thought first-half we didn’t play controlled enough and we made too many mistakes and conceded too many penalties.
“We had to defend our line for long periods, we came out of yardage in a difficult way, but they (Hull) made it really hard to be honest.
“We defended pretty well, we had a lot of one on one cold misses but I thought we got back and scrambled well.
“I thought the first try was a dead set forward pass, though.”
Agar does have one injury concern, with Alex Mellor going off in the first-half with a knee injury.
“He’s heard it pop, some of the testing suggests it is medial and not a cruciate though.”
