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