Tonight Rohan Smith’s Leeds Rhinos came up short against Hull KR, losing 19-18 in golden point to the Robins at Headingley, leaving them still two points behind Salford Red Devils in sixth.
Speaking after the game, Smith gave his thoughts on the game as the Rhinos three-match winning run and charge towards the play-offs suffered a big blow against one of their rivals, a result that came as a shock given the two team’s respective form.
Rhinos fans were left disappointed at the defeat, especially knowing a win would have put them in the competition’s top six, and Smith admitted that his side fell short as he fielded a number of questions and topics from the journalists after the game – see every word he said after the match below.
Thoughts
Yeah, for sure. Any golden point loss is hard to take because you know you’ve gone the distance but not got the job done.
I thought on a difficult night, conditions wise, we let ourselves down with a couple of those tries early in the game where I didn’t think we were in any trouble defensively but but we had one play poor and that hurt us a couple of times for some points.
I don’t think they scored in the second half try did they? So it was good positive and the way we were attacking with our defence at the back end we kept creating opportunities for ourselves to win it but clearly we let ourselves down with some possession skills throughout the game.
In the first half there was probably a couple of overplay errors that hurt us and then the second half was some mess around the play of the ball that hurt us.
Game Management
I think the game management stuff was probably before that in regular time. We did well, we defended really well in the Golden Point there and credit to the young kid.
He’s been here for a week and he took both field goals, hit the underside of the bar and almost just hit the top side of the bar on the second one, they were both wobblers but got the job done under pressure.
That period we actually defended well but yeah let ourselves down prior to that.
Should have won?
I think we should have tonight and you know there’s a couple of critical calls which you know I believe there’s a few critical ones last night on TV that will probably get more exposure because this one’s not on TV but the ruck’s been untidy for a good period of time now and continues to make hard calls for the referees.
Refereeing
It must be so difficult to referee when the general feedback is, and I’m not complaining.
I’m a bit like Paul [Rowley] last week. That wasn’t the reason for tonight, but, you know, last night, that was a strip, you know, the bloke on the ground was all over the ball, wasn’t he, and the result of the game was determined by that potentially, so there’s just that many of them that are messy and there’s a reluctance to penalise messy early in the game.
And then it just becomes the game’s on the line, like no one wants to give a penalty there. And I actually don’t know if that one should have been a penalty or whether it was just an untidy play of the ball, but there’s a lot of untidy play of the balls, which there has been all year in every game I’ve watched and it must be really difficult to adjudicate on that because it’s messy it’s ugly where in other games I watch from other competitions it’s much clearer about is it a knock on is it a penalty it’s much easier.
Penalise indiscretions without fear of racking up the penalty count. That’s the easy way because then defenders stop doing things because they’re worried about getting penalised. Where at the moment there’s a tendency that you just keep doing it and they won’t keep blowing them.
Again, I’m generalising for the season there, I’m not complaining about tonight. We had chances to win, I thought we competed hard, I thought we had the better of the energy battle but we didn’t execute and that was the reason why we didn’t win tonight.
The last coaches meeting we went to, it was pretty much all the coaches said the ruck was untidy, but since that moment, I’m not aware of any shift or change of angle in the way it’s officiated.
Injuries
Yeah, no I don’t think, I don’t think any other injury concerns. There was a little bit of illness through the group in the last couple of days through a few guys but nothing, yeah, nothing significant we had.
