Jim Lenihan’s frank first Huddersfield Giants impressions made clear

Jim Lenihan got a brutal first-hand view of the task at hand with Huddersfield Giants after watching his new side slump to a woeful defeat at Leeds Rhinos.

Huddersfield, Super League’’s basement side, played in front of the Australian and produced an awful performance as the Rhinos ran in nine tries.

It was a sobering watch for Lenihan after arriving in the UK this week, and emphasised just how much wokr needs to be done.

“At the moment, we’re a long way away from where we need to be,” he said on Sky Sports. “But it’s obviously where we’re at at the moment, so there’s a lot of hard work in front of us.

“It’s probably less about winning than losing right now and finding an identity and working really hard. We’ve got to stop feeling sorry for ourselves, we’ve got to stop being a victim to things and go out there and be unapologetic about the way we’ve got to play and improve a lot and that’s going to come through training and not so much worrying about the outcome of win or loss, but making sure that our performance and physicality is where it’s got to be and right now at the moment it’s not quite there.”

Lenihan added: “I think I’ve seen it a little bit in us at the moment where we do little bits okay and then we have some really horrible parts of our game, so the very best of our game and the very worst of our game is a long way away at the moment, so there’s no shortcut to where we’ve got to go, we can’t just go out here and try and just try and get a shortcut, try and fix things. We’ve got to have a real change with our mentality and our physicality and make sure that that gets done in the training paddock.”