St Helens 18, Leeds Rhinos 4: YEP video review

YEP rugby league scribe Peter Smith reflects on Leeds Rhinos' disappointing 18-4 loss at St Helens.

Transcript

00:00What a disappointing evening for the Leeds Rhinos here at TW Stadium where they've been beaten 18-4 by St Helens.

00:07Going into the game you'd think that if Leeds are ever going to win here, and it's a ground they've got a pretty poor record on,

00:13tonight would have been the night. Leeds nearly at full strength, Saints missing some key players,

00:18but from early on it just looked like it wasn't going to be their night.

00:22Simple to pinpoint what went wrong really. Leeds dropped far too much ball at both ends of the field.

00:28Some of the handling was terrible. All Saints points came from Leeds errors.

00:34In the first half, Leeds dropped the ball twice in Saints territory when they were trying to play the ball,

00:39and that is the sort of mistake you just can't make. On a hot night like this, it's difficult conditions,

00:47but it was the same for both teams and Saints handled it a lot better.

00:51Brad Arthur in his press conference has said that Leeds were out enthused and that should never happen,

00:56but it certainly looked that way tonight. It's probably a bit of a reality check for Leeds

01:02after five successive wins and climbing to the table. Obviously there's still a lot of work to do.

01:08This was the sort of performance that it looked like Leeds had got out of their system after last year

01:13when they were regularly letting the game slip because of their number of handling errors,

01:18but it was back to the bad old days today. Picked up an injury concern as well to Morgan Gannon,

01:24who apparently has a shin injury which will be scanned. So it's not been a great evening for Leeds at all.

01:30Really disappointing and they'll have to get their chins off the floor for a really very important game

01:35against Leeds next week. They'll need to play much better to get anything from that.