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

Yeah I'd really love Smith and Tansey to have been controlling us around the park in the halves, considering the amount of times over the years I saw them in city centre absolutely battered (I had to pick an absolute smashed Lee Smith up off the floor of a VIP area just 2 weeks before the '08 GF) whilst Smith got MOM that GF I seriously doubt their attitudes/discipline would've been a recipe for long term success.

Appreciate gale had to move to develop and not saying we could/should have kept him.Think he has really improved at Cas.

Memory must be going Luke Burgess and Scruton slipped my mind. Be interesting to see who comes through and gets a chance with Cameron smith and the polish lad who is too much for predictive text.

Lots of kids come up through age group rugby as half-backs, simply because they're the best player at that club and coaches want their hands on the ball as much as possible. They lack the skill set to make a professional half back though, so end up getting shifted into different positions as their careers develop.

Forwards are a difficult one. For much of the last decade, the Leeds pack has had a pretty settled look to it with the exception of the odd one or two who have come in and gone out again. Peacock, Leuluai, JJB, Ablett have all been around along with the likes of Bailey and Kirke for most of that time. To break into the side and stay in it, any Academy product has had to be of the very best quality.

The thing is people have looked like they could be quality but we dont seem to have put the time in
2 years ago we have a few injured props and Mulhern and Minchella are given games- both looked okay
Then some second rowers got injured and we gave game time to Alex Forster- looked good and one of the bright spots in London 2014
Then we had a crisis in the hooking role and Robbie Ward given again- again looked okay and was vital in beating Leigh in that CC QF

But once established players were back all were quickly forgotten about and shipped either on loan or back to the 19s until we needed them again through injuries, not given nearly enough first team game time to really progress
In fact since about 2009 are there any players except Ward and Watkins who wernt only given a chance through injuries?