After a run of three wins, Leeds Rhinos’ loss to Hull KR was a bitter pill for the Rhinos to swallow.
It still leaves them outside the top six with eight games to go. They are currently two points off sixth but that gap could be extended out to four if Salford Red Devils beat Leigh Leopards.
The Rhinos scored tries through Jarrod O’Connor, Corey Johnson and Ash Handley, his 100th Super League try, but they squandered opportunities to win the game and lost in Golden Point.
After the game, Rohan Smith gave his thoughts:
“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.”
When asked if the Rhinos should have won, the Leeds boss highlighted “critical calls” that went against the Rhinos.
He also said they wouldn’t get the same exposure as those in the St Helens game as it wasn’t on TV.
“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.”
