Leeds Rhinos coach Brian McDermott admits that despite victory against Huddersfield Giants on Thursday night, he was far from happy with the level of performance from his team.
The Rhinos were cruising at 18-0 after half an hour, but were left grateful for a late Paul Aiton try to eventually get them over the line with a 28-24 win against a scrappy and resolute Huddersfield outfit.
And McDermott said afterwards that there’s not many aspects of the performance he’d be looking to carry over for their next game, insisting they have to improve.
“I didn’t think it was a great performance if I’m being honest,” McDermott said.
“I’m happy we’ve won because that’s what we want to do every week, but at moments like this it qualifies why coaches talk about performances.
“There’s not much from this game that I want to take over to next week. There’s a lot of things that we need to be better at, and I really didn’t think that was good from us, and we should have had a grip on it more.”
McDermott also believes that the Giants were allowed to slow the game down without punishment as the game wore on, admitting that from a coaches perspective, the game was “scrappy” to watch.
“I don’t want to disrespect Huddersfield; they were staring down the barrel of three straight losses and therefore they’re going to be determined to fight back into it. However, I thought they were allowed to do certain things in the ruck which made it unbelievably scrappy and frustrating to watch as a coach.
“It was a very poor standard game to watch in the second half.
“Again I don’t want to have a crack at Huddersfield because they were facing up to a third defeat in a row, and one of the ways of defending against us is by slowing the ruck right down, but they need to be held accountable for that.”
