Brains, brawn, battle and bottle: The bloody-minded Leeds Rhinos winning machine does it again
There will be fresh challenges and fresh challengers next season, a redeveloped Headingley, unknowns galore - but they will keep doing things the way they have always done
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Your support makes all the difference.Three snapshots of a bruising, brutal Grand Final.
One: Leeds forward Adam Cuthbertson happily chatting away for the cameras, carrying out post-match interviews while a member of the club’s medical staff attended to a gaping wound in his head, as if this were the most normal thing in the world.
Two: second-row Stevie Ward, slumped on the floor with a heavy, world-weary grimace. Seven days earlier, he had been lying in agony in a hospital bed with a dislocated shoulder. Somehow, he had patched himself up in time to play. Now, the adrenalin and the injections had long since worn off. It had been a long day, a long week, a long season. Only a Grand Final victory could possibly be worth this sort of pain.
Three: a few moments earlier, back out on the pitch. The lights had gone down at Old Trafford, all the lights but one: a fierce and brilliant spotlight trained on the centre circle, where Danny McGuire and Rob Burrow, Leeds’s departing heroes, were holding the Super League trophy aloft to a backdrop of exploding fireworks. At the edge of the pitch, in darkness, sat the distraught Castleford players. Coach Daryl Powell had made them all stay and watch. He wanted them to hurt. He wanted them to remember what it felt like.
They breed them tough in this sport, and for good reason: this is a game that doles out its pain in many different forms. On Sunday afternoon the wounded Castleford Tigers returned to the Mend-a-Hose Jungle for a hollow homecoming, trying desperately to take the positives from their 24-6 drubbing in Manchester. There were, to be brutally frank, not many. “We save our worst for the biggest occasion,” said Luke Gale, the talismanic Man of Steel. “You wouldn’t win an amateur game with that many errors. It’s a hard one to take.”
There is probably a conversation to be had about whether the Super League format – with a regular season of 23 games, a post-season of seven games, semi-finals and a final – is really the best way of determining the best team over the course of a season. Six different League Leaders in six seasons, yet only four different Grand Final winners in 20 years, would suggest not. But then, true champions turn it on in the biggest games. And in 12 months’ time, Castleford will hope to be back: scarred but not scared, a year older but perhaps a year wiser too.
“The feeling of watching Leeds lift that trophy will stay with me for a long time,” Gale said. “It's not a nice feeling.”
Before the game, Powell had talked about the Castleford ethos of “class and steel”. For Leeds, it was more a case of brain and brawn. They adapted outstandingly to the wet conditions: keeping it simple, keeping it central, keeping it straight. They made all the right decisions. Meanwhile, they threw themselves into every tackle, fought for every loose ball, chased down every lost cause. Leeds left pieces of themselves all over the Old Trafford pitch.
Instinctively, you felt, Leeds knew how to handle occasions such as this. Old Trafford has become a sort of second home for them over the years. “There is a sort of feeling of invincibility with this team,” said Rob Burrow. “That’s not in any way arrogance, you just believe in yourselves. You can’t come here and dip your toe in. You’ve got to leave the performance. It’s probably something Leeds have got over most teams, being able to play well here.”
But now Burrow is gone, and so too man-of-the-match Danny McGuire, whose last game for Leeds was a masterclass in leading by example, even before you took his two tries and two drop goals into the equation. Leeds must now rebuild, and they must do it better than they did in 2016, when the departures of senior players like Kevin Sinfield and Jamie Peacock left a vacuum that very nearly sent them spiralling into relegation.
Watching Leeds on Saturday night, though, you got the feeling their future was in safe hands. Take rookie full-back Jack Walker, 18 years old and playing for the academy at the start of the season. Take senior players like Ryan Hall and Kallum Watkins, players theoretically at the peak of their careers. And take Ward: the brilliant 23-year-old who dragged himself out of a hospital bed for the love of Leeds.
“I love Stevie Ward,” Burrow said. “He's an absolutely fantastic player and a fantastic bloke as well. He would be my choice as the next captain, if you ask me.”
And so the Leeds circle of life renews itself. There will be fresh challenges and fresh challengers next season, a redeveloped Headingley, unknowns galore. But they will keep doing things the way they have always done them: with brain and brawn, with battle and bottle, with the bloody-minded assurance that has driven one of the most efficient winning machines the modern game has ever seen.
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