Leeds Rhinos boss highlights some “obvious” missed calls against St Helens

Leeds Rhinos came up short against St Helens in the Challenge Cup at the weekend and after the game Rohan Smith raised questions about the officiating.

Speaking ahead of the game against Castleford Tigers, Smith highlighted an “unfortunate call” that cost the Leeds Rhinos against St Helens.

He said: “It’s been disappointing. We didn’t play as well as we’d like and we missed a chance to do our best performance to try and progress in that competition. We certainly missed a chance there. We were right in it and even at 10-6 we had an unfortunate call going against us which we weren’t good enough to recover from.”

Asked later what he was referring to, Leeds Rhinos boss Smith confirmed he was referencing the Jon Bennison try. Asked if he thought it was a knock on, Smith said: “Yeah I do, you can see by the reaction of all the players, but there was no video on our ref so those close calls, yeah they go out of the way.”

Leeds Rhinos boss speaks out on “obvious flops”

The Leeds Rhinos Head Coach would also suggest that some “obvious flops” weren’t given during the game.

He said: “We’re not looking for anything that we we don’t deserve but there was some some obvious flops and that impacted the game and the crowd of the ones that we see out and you can hear the frustration amongst the fans.

“But it is what it is, we’ve got to play the game as it’s as it’s adjudicated and we we’ve clearly got plenty of scope to improve our performance, irrelevant of the officiating.”

This came as Smith continued to raise questions about ruck speed highlighting “frustrations” especially among fans who want a faster game to stick their teeth.

Smith and fans were led to believe that a faster game would be the case in 2024 after some small adjustments were made to the six again rule and officiating around the ruck.

Though Smith felt this was initially the case he seems to feel that the ruck has again got slower which is widely believed to work against the Rhinos.