Leeds Rhinos Netball have two-fold ambition for Super League trip to Saracens Mavericks

That is the hope of director of netball Liana Leota who has had to pick her first-team players up off the floor this week after a deflating opening-day defeat to Severn Stars

Rhinos had the very first action of the 2024 season in last Saturday’s opening game of the launch weekend in Nottingham but immediately turned that centre throw over in a move that set the tone for a heavy 57-41 reverse.

“That first centre pass going wrong told me how that game was going to go,” said Leota, ruefully, a few days after the fact.

Asked what went wrong, she admitted it was a variety of factors.

“It was the bright lights and all the wow factor that was there that day, and we didn’t quite turn up,” she admitted.

“We’ve got to put it down to a really good learning opportunity. We had played so well all pre-season, we got the privilege of playing New Zealand before the Nations Cup and their coach came up to me afterwards and said we gave them a game that they hadn’t seen before. She said ‘you should be really proud of your team, you’ve got a good squad there’, so even that gave me encouragement.

“So I think there was a bit of complacency and we thought we were going to walk into that first game. It was an eye-opener, it made us realise that we have to dot the I’s and cross the T’s and make sure we prepare well for every team, not just the big teams.”

The emphasis heading into the Saracens game on Saturday evening is to get the small things right.

Leota explained: “All week we’ve talked about easy wins. If we had done those things how we usually do them or if we kept to the game plan or the structure we would have got points, so it’s those tweaks that we know we can be accountable for but we also know they’re non-negotiables. We committed 19 bad passes which is just crazy, we didn’t have that all last season, so there’s definitely individual tweaks we can make.

“I don’t know whether we were overwhelmed and couldn’t find that calming inner voice, so those are the things we are focusing on this week.

“Saracens are rebuilding with a new team but they’ve also got some defensive force behind them. We have the attacking team to do it, but once again, are we going to be smart with the ball, are we going to be patient?

“We talk about ball skills and ball distribution being our super-strength, but we didn’t show that on Saturday. So how can you say something is your super-strength, when we didn’t action it.”

Saturday’s game is also the first instance where three Rhinos teams are playing three Mavericks teams on the same day, with the Under-21s meeting at 11.30am, the Under-19s at 1.30pm and then the senior outfits at 5.00pm.

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It is a growing initiative in the league to get fans involved throughout the day and is also something Leota wants to utilise as she looks to get all the Rhinos teams playing the brand of netball she wants the Super League team to be mastering.

“We want those U21 and U19s players to go to our NSL girls as if they’re normal people, they’re developing a relationship,” said Leota, who revealed the Under-21s will travel on the bus down to Hertfordshire with the senior team.

“We don’t want this big gap between the age groups, we want it to be a case of when they filter into our system they know everyone.

“It’s not this all high-and-mighty team; we’re all one team.

“We’ve been trying to filter though a few U21s into our training programme this year so they know what the intensity is, what our demands are, what a training day looks like.

“For me the pathway is our future and for us to be sustainable as a club we need that to grow.”