No doubt this guy has a great football brain......but for a halfback he is so painfully slow !
On several occasions against Huddersfield he broke the line and was easily caught by the opposition. Given the same freedom all the truly great halfbacks would have strolled over the whitewash once in the clear....is the lad a smoker !

Not sure I ever saw Andy Gregory - or Kevin Sinfield for that matter - score an 80m breakaway try.

Have said it before...expectations of individuals are sometimes too great. How many actual COMPLETE all round skilled individuals are there/has there ever been?

Just looking at our present team England internationals:

Hardaker (at least until end of 2015 season) has superlative defensive qualities but not so great attacking abilities.
Hall (at least until end of 2015 season) has great finishing qualities but is hardly blessed with great pace either.

etc

Lilley looks fine to me...a great brain and ability to take contol/make commands. Yes he lacks pace, but if he is at least as good as eg Dobson (and I believe he is) then he will do for me. It's up to the rest of the team to anticipate his breaks and support him.

Lilley is getting better and better. How refreshing to see a Leeds halfback with a variety of kicks.

I would rather my half backs can create space for others, have a good passing game, neat kicking game and a good football brain. Lilley looks to have potential on all these fronts.yes, if he has a bit of pace great, but it is not essential imo in makings of a top half.

I tell ya what Brough couldn't catch him! Missed the ankle tap.

Lilley is never gonna go the length of the field! But what they can work on is his speed over 10 to 20 meters. All he needs is a little injection to clear the cover and pass the ball.

if he is so slow how come the Leeds attack aren't in support when he makes a break?

Cos the rest are still stood behind the goal posts silly billy.........................

? He has one kick, end over end bouncy one straight at the line with fairly random degrees of weighting - soft or really, really hard. Sometimes it works though, and these are the things you develop with experience. If he could stick around for a few years he has chances. Does need to improve his defence though.

If he'd have been blessed with pace I doubt he would have developed the other aspects to his game and would be just like every other halfback produced in this country in the last 10 years

He forced a series of goal line drop-outs with these supposedly random kicks, which is more than any other Leeds player has been able to do for years, so if they are random then they're pretty lucky. He's also got a decent bomb and his goalkicking is very secure. He's young enough to improve all these things and also learn fancy Cronk/Reynolds torpedo bombs, but he's got better kicking tools already than anyone else at the club. Whether he'll completely make it at absolutely top level as an all-around player is another matter but he seems level-headed and has the potential.

He has the best goal kicking percentage in super league. He has enough pace to make an initial break and he reads the game better than most. Also he doesn't wait for the game to come to him. He gets himself involved. He's also 19 for crying out loud. Imagine him in his mid twenties.

He should stay in the team for his goal kicking a loan. The majority of games we've lost this year have been by 4 points or in other words, missed conversions.

Spot on. Also any day of the week I'd take someone who has the awareness/brains to make those breaks/interceptions and get tackled 30m/40m short rather than someone who doesn't make them. If Lilley isn't fast enough to finish them off then someone should be on his shoulder in support to finish the job.

I can't believe there is even a thread daring to criticize him! As a Wire fan I think he's been nothing short of fantastic for you guys in the way he has come into the team and kept you in games more than you'd probably like! His rugby brain is top notch and I can see him being your new Sinfield but with more skill if he sticks around. Your best player this year by a mile. Yeah he isn't the fastest but when he intercepts a ball if Watkins is up his backside he wouldn'tneed to be!. If you go down I think he'd make an excellent addition to our team, you can have Ratchford!

Could not agree more - he has the awareness that Mcguire showed in his youth just not the raw pace

Wasn't talking about his goalkicking which is very solid. I stand by the assessment of his kicking game from what I've seen in the last few matches. His high kicks are pretty ordinary, he has no cross field option that I've seen. His one short kick is end over end straight forward. One of the dropouts he forced was from a kick that would have ended up in Manchester had it not ricocheted off a Hudds player into another like a pinball.
I thought Lilley played okay, he took his try really well and you are right, some of his short kicks were weighted well but over the several games I have seen Sutcliffe is the one that looks up and varies his kick and they are attacking kicks looking to create a scoring chance, Lilley does the same kick and it's generally simple to handle.

Yeah. Why isn't this 19 year old who is in his first season the complete player? It really takes the mickey. Surely he's had enough games in a winning team, surrounded by top players in top form to do better than he is. So what if he has been our best half back, he should be better!!!

I think it does young players good to be hyper-critical about aspects of their game. I've seen too many young players come into SL with bags of promise but some serious flaws, and then plateau in their development without addressing them.

Young players in this country have a tendency to reach a comfort zone, where they are good enough to get picked every week without needing to tackle the weak points of their game. Anything which helps jolt them out of that and encourage them to continue developing is a good thing IMO.

That isn't down to us as fans, what right do we really have? I'd like to think that both they and the coaching stuff know that a player should always be working on their game. I doubt even JJB goes in and they tell him to relax because he has nothing to work on.

A thread about Lilley's shortcomings is a fecking disgrace. When I see these things I just hope the players don't stumble across these pages. He's putting his body on the line week after week. His defence might not be great right now, but he never hides. In attack he throws himself into it. In fact, on Friday, he took a drive in when the forwards were still coming back. He clearly loves wearing that shirt and is improving each week. Good enough for me right now

If he hadn't been playing on Friday we'd have struggled to score a point!

Well said. The critical comments about his kicking are a joke. He hasn't played enough games yet to show his full range of talents which will keep on developing.

Can't believe anybody is questioning anything about Jordan. He's coming on leaps and bounds and that is really all he needs to be doing. He doesn't need to be changing games every week, he doesn't need to be your best player every week. He's 19 years old in his first full season at first team and I think he's doing a cracking job for you. He's also a smashing lad and his dad Mark is a really good guy and obviously immensely proud of what Jordan's doing

I'm no Leeds fan but Jordan is a very bright light in your poor season so far, lay off him

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Read my original post. I was arguing a very narrow point regarding his range of kicks, which I then suggested would develop as he gained experience. I wasn't criticising the player, just disagreeing with what I thought was over the top praise of one particular part of his game. But hey, let's just ignore stuff that doesn't suit our desire to have a crack at people and be clever.

He played okay. He took his try well and made a couple of very good defensive reads to make breaks and get us down the field. He's struggling with some pretty messed up running lines from some of our players and a half back partner who is out of form and drifts out of the game.

I am very encouraged by Lilley and tend to agree with the view that he is quick enough to get through a gap – on the basis that he seems to keep getting through them. So a pivot player who can a run through a gap, kick the ball (from hand / place kick) and pass it too – with plenty of potential for all that to develop and for the players around him to be able to better read his game and react off it. He also seems to have the ability to be in the right place at the right time and to make things happen. He reminds me a little of players like James Lowes when they were close to the line – not completely predictable but very effective. It’s a thumbs up from me.