‘They have to learn’ – Leeds Rhinos set for pre-season preview after Brad Arthur decision

Leeds Rhinos’ Super League season might be over but Brad Arthur has made sure his players won’t be disappearing on their holidays just yet.

The Rhinos saw their chances of sneaking into the Super League picture come to an end on Friday night as they were beaten by Hull KR at Craven Park. Even if Leeds had won in east Hull, though, it wouldn’t have been enough with Leigh Leopards just doing enough to make sure of their own spot in the top six by beating St Helens.

With Catalans Dragons beating Hull FC on Saturday, Leeds eventually finished 8th in the Super League table, which is perhaps some way short of their own expectations. Of course much of the damage was done prior to Brad Arthur’s arrival at the club in July, and while the Australian head coach managed to bring a reaction out of his players, it wasn’t quite enough.

As such, Arthur will be keeping his players in camp for another week as they strive to address some of their shortcomings in 2024 and look ahead to what is to come in what the head coach promises will be a tough pre-season.

“We’ll review this week and the final week we’re going to give them a taste of what it’s going to be like and then they can have a bit of break,” Arthur said when addressing his plans for the next few days and beyond. “They have to learn that we should be training at this time of year anyway, playing finals, so we’re going to train.

“Then we’ll come back and have six weeks leading up to our Boxing Day game.

“It will be hard but you don’t get anywhere by not working hard. There’ll be plenty of footy as well but we’ll be putting some time and effort into it.

“We have errors in the play the ball and that detail, if you do it in training it will find its way onto the field. There’s lots of simple fundamentals that we have to get on top of and we’ll be doing them under fatigue.”

Reflecting on some of the lessons he has learned from his 10 days in charge of Leeds Rhinos, Arthur added: “We have to learn how you control a game and that doesn’t just come down to the halves, it’s how you control a game, how you build a game. We’ve shown at times when we’ve built a game and played really well but we just lack that control to be able to do it all the time.”