For 70 minutes there were plenty of moments of promise but despite the change of head coach, the final outcome was worryingly familiar for Leeds Rhinos and Brad Arthur. One of Super League’s most successful clubs have been wandering aimlessly since their eighth and most recent Grand Final victory in 2017.
The fact it will probably be seven years since they last tasted success at Old Trafford underlines the regression that has taken place at Headingley and the size of the job Arthur has inherited.
With Arthur having only agreed a short-term deal until the end of this season, there is a level of uncertainty attached to the Rhinos’ coaching plans, which perhaps sums up where they find themselves as a club. Arthur is not committing to anything beyond the next few months until he sees something to believe in.
You could argue he is also waiting to see if a job in the NRL materialises, with Arthur saying this week he has held talks with the team bidding to get a franchise from Perth admitted into the competition. One of the game’s biggest clubs are surrounded by uncertainty, but in the short term Arthur will have perhaps been enthused by a lot of what he saw.
Yes, the result was the same – with Hull KR moving to within two points of the leaders, Wigan, who surprisingly lost to Hull FC – leaving the Rhinos four points shy of the playoffs as the season enters the final stretch. “I feel like we tried hard and our effort was good enough to win but we lacked a bit of detail at times which put us under pressure,” Arthur said. “It was better than last week.”
He has made it abundantly clear that his immediate remit was to toughen the Rhinos up and there were certainly signs of that against a Rovers side with genuine Grand Final aspirations. Defensively, they were much stronger and even managed to forge a two-point lead going into the final 10 minutes, with tries from Rhyse Martin and Lachie Miller.
Errors at crucial times were their undoing but Arthur will believe he has a platform of sorts to build from. Time, however, is running out for the Rhinos. Missing out on the top six again would be a damning indictment on what has gone wrong in recent years.
“That’s nine weeks away the playoffs, that’s the end result we’re chasing,” Arthur said. “The stuff we did really well we’ve got to maintain. When we learn to stay in the game and get that detail right, we’ll be better for it.”
If Arthur is to remain long-term, he would arguably hope to make much better use of Leeds’s overseas quota. With seven overseas players permitted per squad, there is an argument a number of Leeds’ contingent have underperformed for far too long. The full-back Miller has endured an up-and-down start to life in England and his Rhinos career was summed up here.
He scored the try that put the Rhinos 12-10 ahead going into the final few moments but made errors at critical moments. The centre Paul Momirovski, a high-profile import, is another who is yet to fully find his feet; he and Miller were at fault for the try for Mikey Lewis midway through the second half that put Hull KR back ahead.
Miller looked to have atoned for that when he pounced on an error from Jack Broadbent to nudge Leeds ahead by two and Arthur’s debut looked as though it would end with victory. However, the Rhinos fell apart in the final five or six minutes. Jai Whitbread seized upon a mistake from David Fusitu’a – another underwhelming overseas import – to put the visitors back ahead.
In the final stages with the game stretched, Jez Litten burst through to put the result beyond doubt. “We were close, but close enough isn’t good enough,” Arthur said. That is a fitting way to describe Leeds’s travails of recent years and there is a big job on over the coming months to restore them back among the elite.
