A fair summary.

It is several years since the core of the side passed their peak and so with every year that passes (without the addition of real class recruits) we must as a side be regressing and achieving success becomes that much more difficult as each year passes. Our aging quality players still have something to offer and with the CC finally won we can plan for a more consistent league campaign next season. However my concern is for the limited quality of the bench players and reserves some of whom are either no longer up to top 4 level or with abilities not yet proven at this level.

Our attack certainly misses Web who provided a pivotol link that Hardaker has been unable to replace. This is one of the reasons our backs did not fulfilled their promise this year. Other reasons were an out of sorts Sinfield at 6 and a lack of impact from the bench. Time for Bailey and Kirke to be moved on and it would be great to sign a class halfback but from where?

It is what we have needed really for the past year or two and the fact that we all know that without Kylie and to a greater extent JP that we have virtually nothing in reserve and they both retire at the end of next season, that things look quite bleak on the horizon. Hopefully Cuthbertson turns out to be a good un' but who knows? there have been a fair few dud props come over with decent reps in recent times, Perry (as you know),Cross,Pettybourne and Asotasi spring to mind.

You cannot ignore the losses to Saints, Wigan - what is your excuse for that? and the shocking performance against Catalans again how do you explain that other than the team wasn't good enough - I don't buy into the CC it was a distant memory by then.

There is also the aura of invincibility that Leeds had - teams didn't believe they could beat them when it really mattered in a one off game. That myth is well and truly gone these days.

Against the five teams above them in the league ladder for 2014:

Saints - one convincing win, two narrow defeats
Wigan - one convincing win, one narrow defeat, one convincing defeat
Huddersfield - one draw, one narrow defeat
Castleford - two wins (both fairly convincing) and a draw
Warrington - one convincing win, one narrow win, one convincing defeat

For a team that "wasn't good enough", Leeds did pretty well against the sides above them. Arguably better than they did in 2011 and 2012 in terms of win-loss record.

Lies, damned lies and statistics. In almost all cases, the better results were at the start of the season. As has been well documented, the '11 and '12 vintage got the job done when it counted. The '14 incarnation did not.

Leeds were looking up till the magic weekend game.After they beat Wigan convincingly Wane went away and worked out a game plan and it worked.Apart from the cup games we never looked the same.It is a dilemma for the management though do we move certain players on and I am not talking about Kirke and Bailey here I mean further up the order,do we move on stars from the 'golden generation'and bring in players who will just fill in till we find players of the 2004 2009 calibre?
Gary has a big job on his hands

The other day I viewed some of my old recordings of the team when we were in our prime.
With Senior at his best and Webb before he got a bit petulant . Also Mc Guire before he lost his pace.
I thought at the time we were superb, I was wrong we weren't just superb we were absolutely dynamic .
To build another team similar to that I would think under the present structure ,would be very difficult .

The 2014 incarnation did not get the job done this time as far as the SL title is concerned but did finally get the job done in the CC seeing off eventual champions Saints, Wire and Cas which also has to be taken into consideration when evaluating this year. If that crazy last minute error had not have happened against the Dragons there is every chance we would have gone on to OT again looking at the way the play off series panned out after we were eliminated.It was a missed opportunity for sure, we could be all on here now still toasting a wonderful double, it really is fine line between success and failure.

a simple question -If we had picked up the routine 6 points we should have picked up against the Bulls,London (which i beleive we have if not fo CC) and Hull in the last few games and finished top 2 but failed to win the title, would people still be so downbeat?

It would be hard because the likes of Webb and possibly even Lauititi (who was a bit troubled but had not urinated on his dog in public) would not come over in the present market, and Dave Furner wouldn't have been here either.

Add to that the question of how long it must have been since a team won the GF with home-grown players at 6,7,9 and 13, let alone keep that axis together for 4 titles in 6 years.. It isn't just Leeds that will probably never produce a crop of players of that quality that close together in those key positions again. Even with all the right structures, the success of the academy production line in those few years was extraordinary. 10 of our 2004 GF 17 came through the academy. By the end of the 2009 season you could add Lee Smith, Carl Ablett, Ryan Hall, Nick Scruton and Luke Burgess to the list. That's an extraordinary number of winners medals straight from the academy. It's been great, but it's not replicable.

Probably not. Finishing 2nd, with a pot in the bank and a bit of late season form would make things look different. But if my auntie had balls she'd be my uncle. The trouble with living by the "doing it when it matters" approach is that you have nothing to fall back on when you don't do it when it matters.

In any case, in evaluating this year, I don't think it was such a terrible year. It's my expectations an optimism for next year that's the concern for me. And I am usually (see, well, most of my posts) quite optimistic about this sort of thing.

Last year cannot be viewed as anything but a success. We won one of only 2 real trophies on offer. What was dissapointing was the second half of the season when the rot kicked in and the future looks less and less rosy as you realise the players a lot of them are on the dip. Don't think we will be right out of the reckoning but will certainly be battling for 4th place at best in my opinion.
Even the Wigan chairman has discounted the Leeds team alluding to the threats as wire and sts

Our teams since 2011 are replicable. Yes, you would struggle to repeat 2004 and 2005, but then again we have made not efforts to repeat it anyway.

Fair enough.

I just think Leeds have played the system for how it is these last few years and particularly this year when clearly targeting the CC. With just a little bit more concentration and desire we would have finished top and if next years system was in place this year, and we had to be in the top 4 or out of the play offs, then we wouldnt have been afforded the luxury of taking the foot off the gas. Of course we ultimately ended up with egg on our faces this time but you can't really blame the players for that mind set as they have done it from outside the 4 twice.

Coulda woulda shoulda.

Those using the excuse of 'tossing it off' or 'playing the current system' also need to take into account that other teams (certainly Wigan, Wire and Hudds) we're also 'playing the system' this year, hence Cas finishing the season so high.

With recent performances, I'd expect all three of those teams to be able to perform well consistently more often than Leeds.

One other worry is that the 'bully boy' tactics worked so well against us. Wigan set the blueprint on that front - even Leigh troubled us using the same tactics.

I probably wouldn't use Hudds as an example of a team playing the system.

Also Warrington I don't believe played the system this year I just think they honestly struggled early doors to life without Briers, Morley, Hodgson.

I'm not ignoring those losses. The Saints one, well bit of a tricky one to be overally critical on as we went with 12 men for 60 mins and they only just scraped past us. Wigan, we lost comfortably away to them, they lost comfortably away to us. I know we weren't good enough against Catalans but that's one playoff game it happens, it happened to the 2006 team, I thought the talk was about how we'd get on as a whole for a league season next year......I'm not ignoring losses, yet some are ignoring the wins we managed to pick up this year too.

We lost twice to a very weakened Saints side, Wigan beat us twice - you appear to have overlooked the magic weekend? The talk is can this side still cut - based on the second half of 2014 it is doubtful. I cannot see any tangible evidence that this side can still challenge the top sides in the league.

So you basing it on the 2nd half of the season.....yet want to include the losses to Saints and Wigan from the first half of the season? Which is it?

Not overlooking any loss, I've quite happily talked about the defeats we've suffered this year AS WELL as the wins we've had......it's the people who think we won't make top 4 next year that have only mentioned losses whilst ignoring the wins.

Why is that? Why are people ignoring the fact that we've also been capable of beating every team in 2014 barring Hudds (which we were a drop-goal against the post away from beating)? My view isn't overlooking/ignoring anything, it's actually basing it on the full season.....and I admit there is a good chunk of bad in there so I can understand why some think we'll be outside the top 4 next year......but perhaps some others should try practise what they preach and not ignore games (namely any game we didn't lose) when coming to their conclusions.

The point of mentioning the Magic game is that it was week 13 so half way and it was when things started to go down hill - Wigan's depleted team simply beat the crap and the confidence out of them. They were never the same team again after that.

The point about the second half of the season is that is the most up to date evidence we have of how the team is going. Since the Magic weekend they had wins against: Catalans (very lucky), Hull, Widnes, Hull KR and Salford hardly confidence boosting stuff. Catalans apart they didn't beat a top side since the Magic weekend.

The CC is an excuse in my opinion, the beat Saints late April so between May and August they played 1 game in the CC which was against a non SL side. So as a distraction it should not have been even a consideration for an elite professional player.

We still have the conundrum of why they played so badly when it really mattered against the Catalans? 2006 the team was sick of Smith and didn't want to play for him. Early 2007 was equally bad it was only after Smith announced his departure that things started to improve.

I am struggling to see why many on here think the top 4 is a mere formality - it is difficult to argue that the team is ageing and in decline other teams have strengthened and - in some cases - have better youth structures in place.

The crux of the matter for me is this year (and probably a couple of seasons before that) we've been more consistently average/poor than we have been consistently good. Yes they've definitely been playing the system to an extent, but our best is no longer miles ahead of the others, and naturally as our roster has aged, it's harder for them to put a string of top performances together.

Next year we've only brought in Cuthbo (who should be decent), and the squad is year older - so to me it's clear we're going backwards. If we'd blooded lots of youngsters who were ready to go full tilt next year, it wouldn't be so much of an issue, but in reality there's only really Sutcliffe who's been afforded anything like regular minutes.

Here's the thing, though. It's the order in which those wins and losses occurred that bothers me more than the overall number of wins and losses (although that wasn't too awesome, given that we finished sixth). The mantra has always been (because it's usually been true) that this great team always comes good when it counts. It's pretty hard to reconcile "coming good when it counts" with the feeble form we showed at the end of last season. We actually "came good" in February, March and April this year.

People talk about the Bradford and London games but the ones that sit with me are Saints away and at home. When we played them away we were in good form and playing a weakened team. But their youth and enthusiasm did our very poor tactics of playing up the middle. That seemed to be the end of our flowing rugby. Then the game at home worked out well for McD. Again, they were there for the taking. But Moon's sending off gave McD a 're out of jail free car's. We played e game with 14 men which was diabolical - and because the coach 'didn't think feel the need' to play 2 of our bench.

I can imagine our leaders getting the team up for the big games, but tactically our coach is well off. When teams work out our game plan, he can't seem to react.

A good coach looks at his team and plays the best way for the personnel. Looking at our team it's the backline that is strongest but he continued to try and win a forward battle we struggled to do.

The biggest signing for me this off season won't be on the playing side, but an assistant who can bring attacking structure and challenge Brian.

We also played against very weakened sides against Wigan at Magic, and against Warrington at their place. Lost them both.