Rohan Smith has assured Leeds Rhinos fans that they have suffered no injury setbacks after their Boxing Day defeat to Wakefield Trinity. Kruise Leeming and Ash Handley both picked up knocks in the loss, forcing them to leave the field earlier than hoped in the 38-20 reverse.
However, the Australian confirmed neither were serious setbacks and their injuries will be assessed in the coming weeks. Smith said: "Kruise felt that if he had been able to have a few more minutes he'd have been alright and in a competitive game you wouldn't have made that sub, but he came off because we could. Ash Handley had some kind of oblique or core niggle. He was only going to play half a game anywhere and he pretty much got to that."
New signing James McDonnell was in his tracksuit at full-time having not appeared after the break but Smith explained: "James was always only going to play 40 minutes. He played the World Cup with Ireland so didn't have as long a prep as I'd have perhaps liked. But he was fit and raring to go and I felt it was a good opportunity to get in front of the home crowd and he gave a good account of himself."
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On the performance, Smith added: "I had hoped to get an indication of individuals and where they were at physically and footy wise and I think I got a pretty accurate appraisal of each player. The more experienced players at the front end of our squad showed promising signs. We chopped and changed a lot and lacked any real cohesion, which we expected.
"We had a plan for each player and we tried to stick to that and pretty much did. That meant you can't take a whole bunch off at the same time as you need people to play that position. Given we could only play 21 players there were some limitations in order to play each player enough time we felt was reasonable at this moment in time."
Morgan Gannon scored in his first appearance at halfback. On the youngster's display, Smith said: "You guys may call it an experiment, I think everything is an experiment because you're always trying to make something better. You're testing things, I thought Ganno played well."
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