Brad Arthur’s brutally honest Leeds Rhinos verdict after golden point win

Leeds Rhinos boss Brad Arthur believes the best team lost on Sunday afternoon in the capital. Leeds edged out a resilient London Broncos side 21-20 in golden point at Plough Lane thanks to drop goal from Brodie Croft.

It means Leeds now sit just one point off the top six and with just three games remaining, they’ll be quietly confident of picking up the points they need to claim a top six spot. They’ll have to step things up in terms of their performance, though, if they are to get over the line and extend their season.

The Rhinos struggled for large periods against London, who remain rooted to the bottom of the Super League table, with the home side scoring four tries to Leeds’ three on the day. Fortunately for Leeds, Rhyse Martin, who bagged a hat-trick of tries, had a strong afternoon from the kicking tee and that gave Croft the opportunity to seal the coveted two points on the day.

Despite the win, Arthur believes his side got lucky on an afternoon that could have been very embarrassing for them.

“There’s not a lot we can say about that performance,” the Australian said. “The other team was better than us today and we got the result. It’s just the way it is.”

“They [London] didn’t deserve to lose. Footy is a tough game sometimes, they were the better team. They hit the [post] twice, they were unlucky.

“We got a bit of luck and we won the game, which is what we needed to do. We are going home with the two points, but we are not happy with how it happened. We have got a five-day turnaround and we know that performance is not good enough. I don’t need to go on and on about it.

“We’ve been up for a long time, our effort and physicality has been really good and I thought they beat us in that part of it today. I don’t want to take any credit away from them because they had a red-hot crack at it. We knew that was going to be the case and we just didn’t execute our footy anywhere near good enough.”