“Join them” – Rohan Smith suggests Leeds Rhinos have to cheat to win

Leeds Rhinos Head Coach Rohan Smith has suggested his side need to break the rules in order to be successful after they lost to St Helens.

It was the second defeat to the Saints in the space of two weeks as the Rhinos came up short in the Challenge Cup seeing their hopes of Wembley dashed.

After the game, Smith was asked about ruck speed and was flabbergasted by some of the officiating.

He said: “I don’t think we got a set restart in the game. If that rule exists, how is that, like, you know, offside matters sometimes, and then other times it doesn’t. It’s like a discretionary penalty all the time. I had concerns last week.

“The number of flops escalated, the number of, in not just our game. Markers standing next to each other again. All the things that were spoken about, I think have gradually or not so gradually regressed. But that’s, you know, what can you do? I haven’t spoken about it to our players, you’ve just got to get used to it. We’ve just got to join them.”

Elaborating on the “join them” remark, he said the Rhinos needed to start getting better at flops and being offside saying: “We’ve got to get better at flops. We’ve got to get better, more consistent at being offside.”

Leeds Rhinos boss says offside rule doesn’t matter

When questioned how these rules affect his side’s attack, the Leeds Rhinos boss would say that the offside rule doesn’t matter.

He said: “The way the game was refereed, pretty consistent throughout today. After half time I thought we tackled better so that helped our attack. The two go together. It’s very much a game of complementary facets of the game rugby league I believe.

“So the better you tackle usually the better you attack as well. I think we saw parts of that. The games will get faster I guess with, well maybe they never did last year. It is what it is. I’m not going to bother about it. We’ll just play direct, very direct with how we play. It has to be the way because offside doesn’t matter most of the time.”