Leeds Rhinos have made the same poor start to the season as last year but Richard Agar believes they are in a worse position now, while questioning the depth of his squad.
The Rhinos won only one of their first six Super League games last season and history has repeated itself this term, with only a single success from the opening half-dozen rounds after defeat at Salford Red Devils last Friday.
“Clearly we’ve got some important players missing and a lack of continuity. But for me the manner in which we performed is worrying, and the couple of no-shows we had against Wigan and Hull are really concerning,” said Agar.
“We’ve shown we can’t cope with having some of the better players out of the team as well as we thought we were going to be able to.
“I felt we had a squad at the start of the year that could cope a lot better than this.
“The comparison I’ll use is last year, I think we had exactly the same record and we ended up in the penultimate game of the year.
“We had a lot of disruption in our team, we were making makeshift halfbacks every week, but we were competing a lot better (than now).
“We’ve got to give a lot of thought to where we are now.”
Agar admits his position as head coach is under pressure and he has to turn the side’s fortunes around.
“We don’t look like the team I know we can be and I’ve seen us be before,” he said.
“And we don’t look like the team I’m seeing in preparation for the games. The style of footy we’re playing and the decisions we’re making, I’m just not seeing that.
“As a coach, it’s my job to get a better response and reaction and impact out of them.
“I’m an experienced coach and the first place I will always look is myself.”
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