Leeds Rhinos' kids hailed but Wakefield Trinity boss sees 'plenty to be happy about' in Boxing Day loss

In Powell’s first game as coach, the newly-relegated Betfred Championship visitors led 16-0 after 14 minutes and 22-6 at half-time, before Rhinos took control in the second half to regain the Wetherby Whaler Festive Challenge trophy. Powell reflected: “We started great.

“I thought in the first half in general we were really good. We defended well and Leeds scored from a kick, but apart from that I thought we were excellent. The second half was a completely different story, but we lost Max Jowitt at half-time and then Lachlan Walmsley ended up coming off, so we got rattled a little bit. Obviously, both teams changed a fair bit, but there was plenty for us to be happy about and plenty to work on, which is generally what you find in these games.”

Trinity fielded a new-look squad and Powell added: “We’ve brought a lot of players in and we had Liam Hood playing at half, which he won’t have done that much, alongside young Myles Lawford.

“We were missing a bit of creativity in there, but Myles started the game really well and Hoody was good, defended really well. In the second half I was disappointed we lost our discipline a little bit around Leeds getting back into the game.

“I thought Leeds’ young players were exceptional, they played really well and at the end they put us under a lot of pressure with the change of angles and offloads. It was a disappointing second half, but I would say overall it would be a really positive game for us where we’ve learned a lot about individual players. We’ve seen how good a team we are going to be with a lot of quality players to add in and seen where we need to improve as well, so it’ll give us a really good focus going forward.”