Super League round-up: Leeds Rhinos, Huddersfield Giants suffer opening-round defeats
Leeds Rhinos boss Brad Arthur lamented his side’s inability to execute as his much-fancied side fell to another of the pre-season dark horses.
Leigh were defeated in the last-four of the 2025 season, but started the new campaign with a 26-14 victory over Leeds.
Tries by Innes Senior and Edwin Ipape ensured Leigh held a slender first-half lead before Riley Lumb, Matt Davis along with Lachlan Lam dived over in an impressive day-one display.
Cooper Jenkins and Brodie Croft (pictured) responded for Leeds and head coach Brad Arthur acknowledged they were short defensively.
Arthur said: “Defensively, when it gets fast, we need to tighten up the ruck a little bit and limit those red-zone penalties.
“That is the way the game is going and I’m all for it. We’ve just got to get better at managing it.
“We just have to be patient and push through it. I’m one that is pushing for it, but we’ll go back and the first thing we’ll do is look at what we did. I was really happy with our effort, our fight, and thought we had some good periods of physicality, but some detail… two scrappy tries that you can't afford at this time of the year.
"They're not excuses, just reasons why, but I said to the group that we kept fighting hard. We weren't at our best with some of the execution."
Huddersfield Giants failed to navigate the conditions as they fell to a season-opening defeat to Catalans at a muddy Stade Gilbert Brutus.
In torrential rain, Ben Condon crossed over for the Dragons opener before Charlie Staines added a superb second. Tommy Makinson put the hosts further ahead after the break and Solomona Faataape rounded off the 26-14 victory. Sam Halsall and George Flanagan replied for Huddersfield.
Giants head coach Luke Robinson said: “I don’t think there was ever any question of no fight from the group or they weren’t working extremely hard.
“We just got a little bit of a lesson in building momentum, where you put the ball and the kicking game.
“It is obviously very, very disappointing after we had a real good off-season, but we just got beaten by the better side.”