Spirit of the Rhinos is a peak behind the curtain of a club that left the front door open

If only for one episode, the Spirit of the Rhinos series on Leeds’ 2024 season resembles one of the Penrith Panthers’ behind-the-scenes documentaries on any of their recent NRL title victories. There’s lots of talk about rugby league’s favourite buzzword, “culture”. There’s plenty of footage of the players standing in a huddle, counting to three, and shouting BROTHERS! In Ash Handley’s spectacular tries against Salford and Hull KR, there’s even some world-class rugby league. And much like those Panthers documentaries, it all feels incredibly mundane and, dare I say it, boring.

For the first half of 2024, Leeds clung to those two Handley tries like a mother holding a newborn baby to their bosom, deluding themselves they were evidence that head coach Rohan Smith was actually on to A Good Thing. But Spirit of the Rhinos only becomes interesting in subsequent episodes, when it becomes apparent that behind the scenes at Leeds looked exactly as fans feared judging from the outside.

Transparency is to be admired, but the Rhinos might have been better off being a bit more coy in recent years. Two days after Leeds scored a try with their last play of the 2022 regular season to snatch a place in the play-offs, I was doing some work in a cafe next to the Rhinos’ Kirkstall training base and was caught off guard by their assistant coach at the time, Sean Long, sitting down on a table next to me. Long was soon joined by two fellow members of staff, who had to talk him out of quitting his job there and then. Rohan Smith had only been in charge of Leeds for a few months, and his fresh voice kickstarted the Rhinos on a run that ultimately inspired the team to a surprise Grand Final appearance. But Long was exasperated by Smith’s lack of communication, and was only prevented from walking out of the club by his own reputation as one of rugby league’s most unpredictable renegades. “I know it will only be, ‘Oh, Longy’s lost his fucking head again,’” he told his colleagues, one of which joined him in leaving Leeds at the end of the season, alongside fellow assistant coach Jamie Jones-Buchanan.

It was difficult to have too much sympathy for Long at the time. Smith had only been appointed boss at Leeds because Long was part of a coaching cycle that had gone stale, and the new methods clearly provoked an immediate impact. But that peak behind the curtains I was given left nagging doubts about Smith’s personality that only grew as he began to exert more of an influence on the club. From the outside looking in, his recruitment was a mess, his coaching focussed too little on the fundamentals that all successful teams master, and he spoke in press conferences and in the glimpses fans were given of the changing room like a short-circuiting robot.

Spirit of the Rhinos suggests those doubts were justified, and it wasn’t just the fans who shared them. In a team meeting before an early game against Hull KR, Smith shows his players a photo of an empty picture frame and utters a line that would make David Brent cringe: “Be in the picture, don’t be in the fucking frame.” The vague metaphors are a recurring theme. In a similar meeting ahead of a game against St Helens, Smith ends his presentation with a clip of a sniper. “We’re not going just spraying bullets loosely,” he says. “Let’s be fucking calculated with what we do. Keep your focus right, take your shot when it’s there. Let’s go.” The expressions on the players’ faces are far more insightful than the words from their coach.

By the second episode, everyone looks like they want to cry. And that’s when Spirit of the Rhinos gets good. While Smith quickly unravels as he watches Leeds continue gifting opposition teams the softest of tries, his squad struggle to look at him in the changing rooms in the post-match dissections of defeat after defeat. In individual interviews, players speak of wanting to be held accountable, of needing to be told what they’re doing wrong and how to do it right. But Smith doesn't know how to do that himself. At full-time after a chastening 26-0 defeat at Catalans, he talks himself out of delivering a bollocking, his voice petering out as he tells his team: “There’s a lot to take out of that. Be proud of your effort today. We fucking attacked it all the way to the end. Well done you young fellas, that was a good job. A good job.”

In his final few weeks as coach, Smith resorts to the silence of a parent who’s not angry, just disappointed, seemingly hoping an authoritative voice will emerge from a squad he’d deliberately stripped of any experience and replaced with unproven hopes from the Championship. Even after a dismal loss to a Hull FC team that ranks among the worst in Super League history, Smith still tries to praise his players: “Overall, you fucking defending a lot of great stuff there today, a lot of great intent.” And it’s at this point that Rhyse Martin cracks, piping up with a speech that seems aimed at his coach rather than his teammates:

“I just feel like we’ve fucking focused all week on what they were doing, not us. Not what we fucking bring. Everyone was all about Ese’ese running over some cunts and making a thousand metres, but it wasn’t about what we do well at all. Fucking do your job. Don’t worry about any other cunt’s job.”

The look Martin gives Smith while delivering that final sentence is damning. As is Smith’s response. Finally, a senior player has stepped up, but he doesn’t want to hear it. “Don’t blame each other,” he says. “Sort your own shit out. All of us.” The only thing missing is a Mike Bassett voiceover as the documentary cuts to some Sky Sports footage announcing Smith has lost his job.

If there is a hero of the documentary, then it has to be Brodie Croft, who has the talent, good looks, and emotional vulnerability of a World War Two fighter pilot plucked straight from the set of a 1950s Hollywood blockbuster. Someone with a name like Fletcher E Adams, Chuck Yeager, or... well, come to think of it, Brodie Croft.

On the pitch, Croft largely lives up to his status as Leeds’ star signing ahead of the campaign, even with the club faltering around him. Off it, he opens up about the toll of moving from Australia to England in the 2021 with his young family while his wife’s grandma was terminally ill, the stress and strain of inspiring Leeds to victory against Leigh in the highly-charged fixture following the passing of Rob Burrow, and the heartbreak of losing his own grandfather later in the season.

After all the turmoil, some levity is introduced with the arrival of new head coach Brad Arthur, who immediately gains the respect of the squad with his no-nonsense approach in telling them exactly what he wants them to do and rather liberal use of the English language. To put it bluntly, Arthur is fucking fantastic at swearing, truly world class; a man who could leave Gordon Ramsay quivering in the corner of Hell's Kitchen after calling his risotto shit and the chef an arsehole. The footage of Arthur leaves the impression that for all the complexity of elite-level coaching, an awful lot of it boils down to calling the opposition players cunts. Upon hearing this, the Leeds squad are like meerkats, even when they themselves are the target of Arthur’s expletives. Young prop Tom Nicholson-Watton is almost beaming with pride as he asks the cameraman in an interview: “Did you get that clip of Brad at London calling me a dickhead?” It is a genuine badge of honour. After watching Spirit of the Rhinos, I would absolutely love Brad Arthur to call me a dickhead.

His swearing reaches a glorious crescendo at half-time of a home game against Catalans, as Arthur comes up with rugby league’s answer to the John Cooper Clarke poem ‘Evidently Chickentown’ with Leeds trailing 6-0 and their season on the line:

“We’ve talked about fucking challenging them with our effort and our desire and at the moment they’re fucking staying in the fucking fight. It’s good. We’re going to have to fucking fight hard for another fucking full forty. Get deep and be running onto the ball. I reckon we’re standing still catching the cunt. We’ve got to get a bit of fucking momentum onto it and fucking start to generate some ruck speed.”

Leeds go on to win 18-6, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. While the final two episodes documenting Arthur’s arrival are the most entertaining of the series, they crucially don’t reveal the devil in the “detail” Arthur has regularly spoken about since picking up the pieces left behind by Smith, including the specifics of the five-point gameplan he often refers to. It doesn’t matter, because the performances on the pitch and everything we have seen and heard off it suggest Arthur is addressing the issues that need dealing with, and perhaps that’s the biggest lesson everyone should take from Spirit of the Rhinos. At a time when we all want a glimpse behind the scenes, often it’s much more interesting to keep the curtains closed, leave things to the imagination, and maintain an element of mystique. ⬧