Christopher; I get what you write BUT the statistic that matters is FORTY FIVE points. This, by HKR. A decent enough team, but hardly a Saints or Warrington. I honestly think that the players need to spend the next fortnight 'busting their balls' in training and doing nothing but goal line defence. Mind you, sadly Lowes will probably be involved and....?

Not only at KR but pretty much all season. It's the attitude and commitment that's under scrutiny not ability. Is this the players not playing for Furner or are there other issues that aren't apparent on the terraces

Agreed.

Though I don’t think it’s them not playing for Furner. I think it’s an attitude or a focus issue.
When we talk about attitude and not having the right attitude in RL people often then jump to “the players aren’t bothered” or “don’t care”. I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s just we have a group of players who aren’t conditioned to be able to produce that kind of mental fortitude that good defence requires. I think we see it in the opposite way with our lack of patience or inability to apply pressure in attack.

Something McDermott said after a game in 2016 stuck with me. He said something along the lines of “I have to convince them they’re not as tired as they think they are”.
I think that was true then and is true of the team now. We’re missing that little extra 1% or even 0.5% of an effort to either get back inside and in position that little bit quicker, or wrap the ball up a bit tighter, or run it in that little bit faster that in itself is not massive but cumulatively adds up to a lot over 80 mins.

I think the problems are being over-complicated here.

The current squad just isn’t good enough. It wasn’t last year. We’ve gained some quality from last year, but arguably lost more.

It’s easy to talk about attitude etc. but we don’t have enough quality. We have several talented players who aren’t physically up to playing against SL players every week. We have too many errors in us. We don’t play with enough intelligence.

Our most consistent forward has been out injured and our captain has been bang out of form on his recovery.

I’m not going to defend Lolohea too much but who of the rest of the squad has a rubbish attitude or isn’t trying?

Is Walker not trying or has a poor attitude when he’s coming up with repeated mistakes or not saving goal line tries?

No, he’s just young and under-developed. It might take him another couple of years to muscle up at this level, and even then I’m not sure he’s a Paul Wellens.

We are going to lose more games than we win until we get more quality in the team, we had all just better reconcile to that fact.

It’s a salary cap sport. Every club has to have low value players, to afford the likes of Konrad Hurrell and Trent Merrin. The two between them are taking up £300k or 15% of the salary cap alone.

Donaldson isn’t a world class player but he comes on and makes his tackles, which is exactly what his job and role in the team is. With no injuries he’d be unlikely to get into a fully fit side.

You're right there is always a mixture of quality in a side (well, in this country anyway). I guess an indicator of how well your club is travelling is in how good these "reserve" kind of players are.

Leeds are entering into a different phase over the next few years where you'd hope some of this junior talent will be breaking through into first team, but right now there probably is a role for some players like Donaldson - IF they bring an first class attitude.

I think overall we just need to put this game to bed and move on; HKR played pretty well even if we flattered them, and they got some crucial early moments go their way which affected momentum. When we get on the back foot we look very fragile, and we're not good at staying on the front foot, so... we're just going to have to be patient this year, again.