I think your all looking at the unreal position you find yourself and your club in, from the inside looking out.

You obviously focus on players and coaches and even KS which all supporters of any club would after a defeat or a series of defeats, but what’s happened at Leeds, and what is still happening, is on a different scale to this.

Whereas... From the outside looking in it is patently obvious that the ship has been steered by someone with no vision for the team itself, allowing a great team to age gracefully as one. He was lost in the success and warped belief “it would just always be like this” because he never had a plan for managed transition.

Action to make change on the playing rosta should have been quite normal....to plan ahead sensibly for a changing of the guard.

But as they approached the precipice, there was no movement, and winning the GF only ensured he took his eyes away from the impending doom.
Following this, a season when things finally came home to roost when finishing bottom 4, did still not have the needed effect and excuses were found as you will all remember well.

Then, when everyone outside the club thought the collapse was imminent, you go and win the GF again !! against all the odds.

This turned out be the ultimate in papering over the cracks as more of stalwarts of your great side of many years also left after this amazing success. Truths were about to bite home.

Suddenly, like no one at the helm had seen it coming, the cupboard “suddenly” looked bare.

And yes, the club had finally arrived at the precipice without a team. And now it was too late to put it right.
Super League needs Leeds in it. Your man at the top is guilty of gross mismanagement of the highest order.
This should simply never happen with a club of your standing, but it has, and still is.
Unless there is fundamental change it will continue, as the Captain Will carrying steering it as he will. Regardless.
As you now cling on by your fingertips, wondering how a team can be so poor ?? How every player has been deemed not good enough for Leeds. Today it’s all but 3 or 4 who did ok. But those 3 or 4 have had their detractors too in previous weeks.

So in the end you reap what you sow, and the person sowing your seeds for the future team appears to have forgotten his bag of seeds.
And now he and everyone is wondering what the hell are they going to do ??? !!! Because it looks like something has gone seriously wrong.
And no-one seems to have the answers, least of all the man who’s steered you to this point.
To blame players or coaches at this late point is tantamount to saying that the band are total crap while the ships sinking.

I agree that he needs to go, and that’s been clear for some time.
I’m going to be controversial though: his Leeds career has been defined by a sequence on niggling injuries. It does happen.
I would question his attitude to conditioning through periods, and he is a liability for penalties which is his behaviour... but I’m sure he would have loved to replicate that England form with Leeds.
There are things he can rightly be criticised for but we should always understand that RL players are human too, and nobody sets out to do badly.

Something that has to be taken into consideration in the 'has the standard plummeted' debate is the way in which defensive structures have improved beyond recognition in the last 10 years or so. As someone else has posted, this hasn't helped the entertainment one jot, but it does make comparisons with the teams 20 years ago that much harder.

I do think that there's something to be said for the top teams not having the same number of quality players that they used to, but I think that's true compared to even 6 or 7 years ago, let alone a generation ago. Take Leeds and Wigan, our 2011 challenge cup final was littered with players that would walk into the current Saints and Wire teams, but equally we're better than our late 90s and early 2000s teams too. The salary cap and the lure of Australia for our better players means that the top teams aren't as good, but I'd say the average level is probably about the same. If the standard across the board was that bad then it would reflect in the national team, which is every bit as good as it has been for some time.

On last Friday, two teams that are really not looking impressive at all. I thought Wigan were a little better over the 80, but Leeds' size had me worried, especially when we had our young lads one, there were some physical mismatches at times. Can't see Leeds going down for the same reason, eventually you'll have more physically than at least London if not 3 or 4 more teams come the end of the season.

There is absolutely no way the defences are an improvement on the 2000-2010 period. In that time you had constant high intensity, in your face, hard hitting defence. None of this soft outlawing of certain tackles we have now. What we have now is an increase in the wrestling technique, I give you that, and a pool of referrees who simply do not understand the rules and how to enforce them. Other than that it is very much sanitised version of what we had.

Not as aggressive, but more organised. You never used to get any of the wrestling/lying on to anything like the same extent. Control of the ruck is a massive, massive part of the game now for everyone in a way that I don't think it was prior to 2010.

One on one defending, fair enough.

I agree with you on controlling the ruck, but insist that is a problem of how refs interpret the rules. They simply don't work to them, and as a result ruin the game as a whole. If they did it properly we would need to get back to the actual tackle technique and defensive line, rather than the half hearted efforts needed these days.