Leeds Rhinos boss' 'won't give in' message after 'silly things' lead to defeat at Salford Red Devils

Saturday’s 22-16 defeat leaves Rhinos four points adrift of sixth place with only seven rounds left in the regular Betfred Super League season and four of their remaining fixtures are against the table’s leading trio. “It is tough,” Arthur admitted of Leeds’ play-off hopes.

“But there’s still plenty of footy to be played and we’re not going to give in the fight. That’s what we’ve talked about there [after the game]. They didn’t give in, right to the death.

“I feel like they’ve done an okay job in terms of their attitude to still be in the game at the back end, with 12 men and still be in with a chance, only six points down. We’ve got to keep chipping away during the week and make sure we’ve got 17 blokes who are clear what their job is. Once we get 17 blokes who know their job each week and know how important it is to get the simple parts right, that will lead to better performances.”

Rhinos meet champions Wigan Warriors at AMT Headingley next Saturday. “We’ve got to take it a week at a time,” Arthur added. “You don’t know what will happen with other results. The only thing we can focus on is how we perform and making sure we get as many wins as we can along the way.

“Then we’ll wait and see what happens to everyone else. There’s plenty of footy to be played, we’re certainly not going to go away from it.”

Rhinos led 12-0 after 10 minutes at Salford, both their opening tries coming after the hosts’ Tim Lafai had been sin-binned. Leeds had Rhyse Martin and James Bentley yellow carded in separate incidents either side of half-time.

Each side scored three tries and assessing his team’s performance, Arthur felt Rhinos’ effort was “very good”, but admitted they did “a lot of silly things”. He said: “[There were] too many errors, sin-bins, penalties; a lot of unprofessional bits and pieces in our game.

“That then leads to frustration and under frustration we are not making clear decisions with the ball and we end up a bit disconnected. I can see the disappointment in the players and they should be disappointed because they tried so hard.

“We probably did a reasonable job to keep them to three tries with the amount of ball and field position we gifted them. We’ve got to learn how to build a game and when we get an opportunity we’ve got to stick to what we’ve practised in the week, be patient and make sure we get some completions. I don’t know what our completion rate was, but it must have been pretty low.”

Rhinos opted to run a kickable penalty when they led by 10 points in the first half, but a knock-on let Salford off the hook. Arthur stressed: “At 16-6 I was happy for the boys to back themselves, play a bit of footy. In hindsight we should have taken the two points, but we are not going to learn by taking the soft options and the easy options all the time.

“We hadn’t had any ball down there, it was a chance to attack at their end of the field and put them under pressure when I thought they were starting to rock a bit. But then we dropped the ball at the play-the-ball, that’s just simple football skill. You can’t do that.”

Justin Sangare returned from a knee injury as one of Rhinos’ starting props, but was taken off late in the first quarter and didn’t return. Explaining that, Arthur said: “He hasn’t played a lot over the last month or so, it got really fast through the middle and we needed those lighter bodies on the field. I thought when he was out there he carried well, we’ve just got to tidy up some other bits of his game.”

Leeds’ other starting front-rower, Mikolaj Oledzki, looked in discomfort when he went off in the final moments. He suffered a chest injury in the previous week’s win at Huddersfield Giants and Arthur said: “His rib wasn’t great. He was busted and went out there and tried to do a job for us. I am not sure where he’ll be for next week.”