Poor old down on their luck Leeds.

Every team has had injuries. The difference is the senior players leeds have had available and the back up players haven't been good enough. Bar Ward every single player has been available/played at some point this season. So this fallacy of ''when Leeds get x,x and y back they'll breeze the middle 8's'' is flawed. Because Leeds were so awesome when Hall, ablett et al played.

The floods can't be used as an excuse at this stage. Leeds best performance of the season was week 1. Since they have arguably gotten worse.

When you get down to it, when you really get into the nitty gritty there are 2 main reasons for leeds shockingly bad season so far.

- The senior players have played poorly, really poorly. Many many times leeds, despite injuries have fielded a team capable of far greater performances than they have churned out.

- The squad has been left with big holes this year which have been exposed through injuries. I said last season that leeds needed someone else at halfback and hooker because one injury to mcguire or falloon and leeds would struggle. But people judged it on numbers and said ''burrow, mcguire, sutcliffe, lilley falloon - 5 players to cover 3 positions, we'll be fine''. Well those people were wrong, very wrong. But the lack of quality is massive. Mcguire and burrow are past their best, lilley is a rookie and I don't even know if sutcliffe is good enough.

It was an oversight from up top. Sinfield announced he was leaving early so there was plenty of time to sign someone. To expect mcguire to both take over the captaincy and have the main responsibility of being creator and organizer has badly affected his game.

No bad luck. This is our own doing. Super league is so competitive now that if you miss a beat you find yourself at the bottom. I look around and I don't see any bad teams, apart from us. To put this down to injuries and flooding not only harms us this season, but for future seasons if we are going to build another championship winning team.

We've won 1 out of the last 12 games.

Oh...

Absolutely correct but unfortunately some people can still see last year's success and won't criticize however bad things get. 1 lucky win in the pouring rain against 11 (sometimes) humiliating defeats. But no1 will ever win 3 trophies attitude is why things continue to be swept under the carpet!

It is an excuse.

We'd have won a hell of a lot more than 3 if we had half of first team back.

But you are correct, we still overlooked strengthening in some key areas and hopefully we do learn from this for next season. Time will tell.

“He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.”

Depends on your outlook if you view them as "excuses" or "factors"

Should've done better yes but we obviously have other factors all adding up.

I think with tus getting injuries to first teamers probably hurts us a bit more because of our style/set-up relays heavily on our starters starting and coming up with key plays whereas a team like Wigan are set up so they can interchange injured players without it having too big an affect.

You could say this is a flaw with our club but it's probably why we've been so successful as well in the past and potentially what's stopped Wigan from winning either of the two big prizes in 3 of Wane's 4 years.

I think that's one of the reasons why the coach is getting a lot of stick, and rightly so. We're 19 games into the season and still apparently waiting for the recovery of everyone to show any kind of form. Injuries can excuse some defeats for sure, and lets be honest after last year most people would have settled (albeit with a few moans) for a mid-table snooze-fest this year, especially with Sinfield and Peacock leaving.

What I find hard to take is that so long into the season the defence looks like an amateur RL lineup on a bad day and the attack is completely directionless. To the point that we're bottom of the league with a bullet with both the worst points for and against. Basically we have been awful all year. No injuries can excuse that.

Although McD and GH made a huge error in not replacing Sinfield and not offering Aiton more money, we'd be in the top 8 if it wasn't for injury. We would have beaten Wire on the opening day if ZH could kick. We then lost 3 players in the Widnes massacre, and the rest is history.

As somebody elsr said on here, look what happened to Wigan at Wakey when half their team was out. Don't care what anybody says, when you've got 8-10 players missing who would start every game, it does affect results

Catalans had almost the same number out as Leeds and a similar number of key personnel - they still managed to get over the line.

Injuries do play a part but not to the extent they have at Leeds this season.

They played the Giants two weeks running - fielded a stronger side week 2 and got beat by a larger margin!!

Injuries aren't the issue. Look at the state of our tackling. None committed, heartless and soft.

The UKIP supporting ex-pat will be here soon to derail the thread claiming that any heartless, soft and non-committed performances from the players is nothing to do with the coach.

Did that really happen though. Wigan had eleven in, that I would say make their 17 regularly enough - Sarginson, Charnley, Gildart, Smith, Clubb, Powell, Mossop, J Tompkins, Isa, Tautai and Sutton. Outside those Burke and Tierney I'd certainly heard of leaving Gregson, Bretherton, Wells and Higginson.



Start - as in the run on side excluding subs?

That would be a problem which games did it happen in?

No one disputes Leeds have been effected by injuries but taking off the blue and amber specs for a minute so have the teams they've faced. I've tried looking at a cumulative count on matchday squad numbers and by that measure Leeds have been nearer their optimum as often as they've been further away (SL Regular Rounds 8 - 8 with 1 draw - Wigan Away)

No doubt there will be anomalies (such as Ferres wearing 26) but it's an indicator at least that Leeds are not alone in this regard.