Rohan Smith unhappy with this from officials after Leeds Rhinos defeat

Leeds Rhinos were beaten last night by Hull KR in a game that hurt their play-off chances.

The Rhinos were favourites going into the game but the debut of NRL starlet Brad Schneider for the Robins was a real wild card.

He scored the opening try which was cancelled out by a burrowing effort from Jarrod O’Connor.

Hull KR then scored two quick fire tries down the right via Tom Opacic and Louis Senior. Schneider notched an assist.

Leeds would pull level through tries from Corey Johnson and Ash Handley but the Rhinos squandered their chances and the Schneider won the game in golden point.

After the match, Rohan Smith said: “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.”

He also highlighted some “critical calls” from the officials and continued to bemoan the “messy” ruck we see in Super League at the moment:

“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.

“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.”