Having been at the game and watched Rohan’s post match thoughts. I thought his description of what happened was pretty accurate. But, the point surely is that though this demonstrates his skill in reading a game, he is actually employed as the coach not as a Rugby League analyst. So, fans are naturally left wondering about how he can’t translate his knowledge of the game into improving the performance of the team - particularly during games.
It is accurate to say that the collapse coincided with Fusitua and Newman leaving the field, and though Martin is an experienced replacement as a back, McDonnell was brutally exposed by Swift on our right hand side. But some of those tries in the second half were terrible to concede.
What Leeds did well in the first half was to keep possession and not engage in daft offloads, and just focus on field possession. This wasn’t exciting but for most of the first half seemed effective. Once the game started to swing back and forth in the second half, Leeds went into giddy mode (when they had the ball) and they started to doubt that they could win out by re-focussing on possession.
A bitter defeat like that is not necessarily a fair place to be drawing broader conclusions, but there are some weaknesses that go back to Rohan’s approach to roster management. Part of his approach is to pick up fringe players from other teams and hope he can improve them. And as usual with any coach in any sport he shows loyalty and support when fans may not feel it’s justified - e.g. Fusitua was having a decent game, but he is very injury prone and fans did question the sense of earmarking a significant part of the cap on a part timer.
And there is also the debate about the balance of accountability between the coach and the players, when things go wrong as spectacularly as they did last night. The startling piece of evidence we have is that Rohan firmly distanced himself from the bonkers idea of the short kick off by Miller near the end (never mind it’s comedic execution). So, why are supposedly experienced players making repeated daft decisions - the answer has to be that this makes the coach look weak, and perhaps unable to stand up to senior players.
