In McDermott's own words after the magic game : "I don't think I'm giving up on the Grand Final ". This man must be delusional. Even the bookies have Leeds over 100/1 to win the Grand Final. Leeds Rhinos have more chance of rowing a boat up mount Everest than getting to the Grand Final.

Agreed. I said weeks ago re the top 4 that as soon as you're in the world of having to use maths to prove you can still do things, you're on a loser. Particularly when the maths ignores not only results to date (which are generally the best guide to moving forward) and actual form. To make the 8 we must be pretty close to needing a bizarre set of results from all other teams as well as winning close to all our games.

Yup. The Salford Widnes game didnt help Leeds at Magic as someone was going to pick up points and move further away.

same goes this week with the Salford Wakefield game and the Widnes Huddersfield game. More moving further away.

Leeds need to be open now and concede that the objective is making the Top 8, it should be about finding better form and get in some better shape for the Middle 8.

This is a point often overlooked.
As the bottom team, if you win a game you are only actually 'closing the gap' on the teams that lose, which is only half of them!
To make the top 8, Leeds are going to have to overtake Huddersfield, Salford, Hull KR and Widnes (if the table stands as it is at the moment). These teams are involved in 4 games against each other, which means that 8 points will be shared amongst them. As such, in reality Leeds are much further behind 8th place than the table suggests.

Leeds' awful points difference puts them in reality on 5 points on the league table.

Unless we get a couple of 50 point wins against fellow-strugglers...

Why is everyone looking at me like that?