Leeds Rhinos reaction: Rohan Smith salutes 'belief and resilience' after fightback stuns Catalans Dragons

Rhinos trailed 22-8 at half-time, but battled back to snatch a thrilling 32-22 victory in front of more than 14,000 spectators and the live Channel 4 cameras.

Leeds dominated the second-half despite having Harry Newman sin-binned for dissent soon after the break and Smith reflected: “When your back’s against the wall, that’s when you find out about people. I thought we played well against a good team, a very good team.”

Rhinos’ third win of the season came a week after a dismal loss at Castleford Tigers and Smith reckoned it “showed there is a lot of belief and resilience in the group”.

He added: “They play footy when the opportunities allow and when we went to 12 men we actually played better, so that was a good sign.”

Newman scored a try in each half, either side of his yellow card, but Smith admitted the centre, who is three games into his comeback from long-term injury, needs to master keeping his cool.

“Every player needs to learn how to manage emotion,” the coach stressed. “That’s a critical part of being a high-performer. It’s not just talent.”

Leeds turned the game on its head after Newman was banished and Smith insisted he was always confident in his side, even when they trailed by 14 points.

He said: “I thought we were attacking well [in the first-half]. We were troubling them, we scored a couple and had one or two other close calls.

"Defensively I thought we were pretty sound in the first-half, despite conceding four tries. One of those was an attacking error, two were on the last play when we lacked a bit of awareness and the other was a tough to call one which went up as ‘no try’. The scoreline is not always reflective and I thought it was a good, close game in that first-half.”

Smith also paid tribute to the contribution made by the 14,000 crowd, saying: “It was buzzing, that’s the most impact I’ve felt in my time here.

“They were riding it high because we were playing well. They love to see the short kick-off and the crossfield kick and people expressing themselves and playing a bit.

“They like to see that and they were probably agitated as well with some other things that were going on, which fed fuel to the South Stand. It was on fire.”