I doubt you last sentence very much - Leeds is the most professionally run club in SL, if you think the preparation for 2016 started when they came back for pre-season I think you underestimate the people running the club. You don't suddenly go from hero to zero and all the good practises that got the team to win the treble go out of the window?

My view is the injuries have been brutal and have exposed the lack of depth/quality in key positions and focuses the attention on youth development - IMO Leeds haven't brought a really top player through since Watkins. That needs to change if things are to improve in the longer term.

Easy in hindsight though!! - even you couldn't have predicted McGuire's piece of genius that turned the whole 2015 season on its head. I don't disagree with everything you say but I do think its easy to say well its the NZ game, its the flooding at Kirkstall, its the SPOTY - all excuses you have you used as to why the team is not competitive. The issues are a bit less superficial than that. Again easy to say it will be all OK after Easter - it will be difficult for it to be any worse tbh.

2017 is a long way off - and it is near impossible to see Leeds losing their first three games of 2017 and having the injury issues they have now - losing 3 players to serious injury in one game seldom ever happens - so you don't need to be Nostradamus to predict an improvement

Stevie Ward? also Singleton has progressed well after we have stuck with him for a couple of years, maybe not top class as of yet but he is still improving at a decent rate so who knows. still early days with the likes of Sutcliffe, Lilley, Golding, Handley, Baldwinson but at least they are now getting the chances. for several years many on here were crying out for fresh blood and now it is happening. Patience needs to be shown though, these lads can't be world class from the get go, they won't be consistent and will make mistakes but that is what will make them better players in the long term. i think it is exciting times for the club if these lads can push on, we will see.

Jury is still out on Ward - he seems to spend more time injured than playing - he has the potential to be a top class player if he can stay fit - time will tell. He has become more of a tackling machine than anything which is a shame as he had some real skills coming through as a youngster.

Well, he was knocking on the door for rep selection so he is pretty damn close to top class already imo, although i still believe like you he has plenty more in his locker which will probably come out more now Sinfield has moved on. Lets not forget he is still just 22 years old, hopefully the injuries will ease.

Agreed - hopefully he has all his injuries at beginning of career.

Jesus , if other teams were making all these excuses we would be just taking the Mickey , there are things so obviously wrong that need fixing up in training and a bit of mongrel in the pack would not go amiss , there is some real powder puff defence going on .

A 32 point defeat for Huddersfield this afternoon at home to Widnes would ensure that Leeds move off the bottom of SL into 11th place.

My glass is half full.

They only lost by 18. Widnes did Leeds a favour taking their foot off the gas in the second half.

Agree about Stevie ward, singleton and Sutcliffe all came thru last season as genuine first team players. However, I think Leeds have brought through very few players in the 10 plus years before that. Abllett, Watkins and jones- bishop, can't think of any others. So no halves or hookers. Ablett came thru around 2006, ward was first back row forward in nearly 10 years. Singleton the first prop since Bailey around 2002. So if I take a half empty view, the academy failed to produce a prop capable of pushing kirke out of the team or a back row forward deemed a better option than achurch in a decade. the legend of the golden generation has kept alive a media endorsed myth that Leeds have constantly produced first team talent on an endless conveyor belt.

Oh I'm sure they'll have been plans but much harder to put in place and execute when you're going all the way to the GF and then spend a decent chunk of time celebrating what you did afterwards compared to the likes of Warrington who had a severe wake up call in 2015 similar to us in 2014 and whose season ended realistically one week into the Super 8's.

For all the planning about players retiring and replacements coming in and through. The one thing no one could predict was how 2015 turned out.

You've said before you're one for mindset, attitude and focus......how do you plan or go about going again (at the same level) after such a dream season? Having the required motivation when you've just fallen short is easy, having it (on top of retiring legends and a flooded training ground) when you've landed every trophy the year before is probably the biggest thing we've underestimated coming into this year.

Yes indeed, it looked promising for Leeds with half hour to go. I believe Widnes were ahead 32-6 at that stage.

Ward emerged as one of the best backrowers in SL imo along with Bateman, Sutcliffe and Singleton are both potential internationals if they fix up a couple of things in their game
We have produced more players than you think (Ryan Hall!), its just that our squads have been so strong (especially 2004-2009) that player have been moved on, such as Luke Gale who would never have pushed out Mcguire and Sinfield when younger but now should be playing for England

Sorry mate are your diamond shoes too tight?


I agree that Ward has the ability to be involved more with the ball, but I for one have no complaints with a player making 40 plus tackles most games with a ton of marker tackles and few misses!

Fair shout on Hall. Gale has really come on and take point he could not get a game when younger. We could do with his kicking game.

Also take point that we have had strong sides but the inability of academy to churn out any props or back row forwards, has resulted in a some less than great forays into transfer market, o'neill, cross, griffin, hauraki, Eastwood, achurch and probably others can't recall.

Probably in part reflects the wider challenges of SL trying to compete with NRL and Gh deciding he had to look down under to get quality he wanted or taking a chance on some of them.

If Gale had been given games when first coming through from academy, he wouldn't escape the exact same criticism Sutcliffe or Lilley will face this year.

Very easy to point to the 2015/16 Gale and say he could've been a starter for us. That's like judging our young halves on how good they'll be in 2021/22

No I couldn't predict one single kick in one single game as no one could.

I did say Leeds would be well in contention for trophies in 2015 and it was based on how we performed in those big cup games and I turned out to be correct.

You said we'd struggle because of the league games around those cup games, and you turned out to be massively wrong.

No dancing around the fact or trying to pass it off as blue and Amber specs will stop you from being massively wrong and me right.....and we all know how much you love knowledgable posters

Read somewhere that this injury crises at Leeds is unprecedented. Whilst we might not have won games, I think with McGuire on the pitch for the WCC, he would have unlocked the brilliant NQC defense a lot more often and with Ward in the team against Catalan last Saturday, Leeds would have been able to defend better. Both of them were sensational in those departments last year and are currently injured.

I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised that Leeds didn't bring a new halfback through over the last decade. With 3 halfbacks as mainstays of the team there'd be little benefit in fighting other clubs for talent, and if I were a kid through the recent period of success I would probably have looked elsewhere also.

OTOH I do think the lack of forwards coming through over the years (although Scruton, Burgess and Clarkson should be on the list as reasonable players) is pretty poor until Ward.

It could be that, but it seems a bit unlikely, more likley thing for halves is they got moved to different positions when they were in the later stages of the accademy as they would be pushing for a place in a team with 3 internationals
Such as Lee smith and Jordan Tansey who got moved to the wing, or even Stevie Ward who I believe was a stand off for the majority of his time in the academy? If Sutcliffe and Lilly were a few years older they may have been made Hookers or something...

Another reason for our lack of a production line academy for nearly a decade is that we havnt had a coach since Tony smith or Daryl Powell who wanted to promote youth players, when he was coach we would regularly have a young player on the bench to come on for a stint to see how they went, compare that to now where the only way a player gets a chance is through the injury of others

A good example of this is Tom and George Burgess who are props from our academy that we for some reason never put the work into developing properly and let bradford take them off us

Yeah I'd really love Smith and Tansey to have been controlling us around the park in the halves, considering the amount of times over the years I saw them in city centre absolutely battered (I had to pick an absolute smashed Lee Smith up off the floor of a VIP area just 2 weeks before the '08 GF) whilst Smith got MOM that GF I seriously doubt their attitudes/discipline would've been a recipe for long term success.

Appreciate gale had to move to develop and not saying we could/should have kept him.Think he has really improved at Cas.

Memory must be going Luke Burgess and Scruton slipped my mind. Be interesting to see who comes through and gets a chance with Cameron smith and the polish lad who is too much for predictive text.

Lots of kids come up through age group rugby as half-backs, simply because they're the best player at that club and coaches want their hands on the ball as much as possible. They lack the skill set to make a professional half back though, so end up getting shifted into different positions as their careers develop.

Forwards are a difficult one. For much of the last decade, the Leeds pack has had a pretty settled look to it with the exception of the odd one or two who have come in and gone out again. Peacock, Leuluai, JJB, Ablett have all been around along with the likes of Bailey and Kirke for most of that time. To break into the side and stay in it, any Academy product has had to be of the very best quality.

The thing is people have looked like they could be quality but we dont seem to have put the time in
2 years ago we have a few injured props and Mulhern and Minchella are given games- both looked okay
Then some second rowers got injured and we gave game time to Alex Forster- looked good and one of the bright spots in London 2014
Then we had a crisis in the hooking role and Robbie Ward given again- again looked okay and was vital in beating Leigh in that CC QF

But once established players were back all were quickly forgotten about and shipped either on loan or back to the 19s until we needed them again through injuries, not given nearly enough first team game time to really progress
In fact since about 2009 are there any players except Ward and Watkins who wernt only given a chance through injuries?