Jack Bird will make his Leeds Rhinos debut against Hull FC, while Brodie Croft will make his return from injury.<\/p>\n
Bird\u2019s arrival was confirmed over a month ago, but a combination of his fitness and the form of the Rhinos, has seen him have to wait to make his first appearance in blue and amber.<\/p>\n
But Arthur has confirmed that the recruit from Wests Tigers will be named on the bench for the trip to Hull FC, allowing Arthur to make a decision on when, and where, he deploys the Australian in the trip to the MKM Stadium.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe hasn\u2019t played for a long time,\u201d Arthur said. \u201cI think it\u2019s been six or seven months since he\u2019s played a game. Our expectations won\u2019t be too high.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe game will decide that once we\u2019re in the flow of it. He\u2019ll come off the bench and the game will decide what\u2019s needed at the time or where it\u2019s at. The situation, I can\u2019t predict that right now. But what I do know is he can go to the centre, he can go in the halves, he can go to back row, he can go to 13. He can pretty much carve up any position for us, similar to Chank.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Croft, Arthur added: \u201cHe trained really well on Wednesday. It was very, very close last week, but we were just beaten by the circumstances that we only had the opportunity for one training session on the five-day turnaround and it wasn\u2019t much of a session, so it wasn\u2019t enough to test him.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re four games into the season, so it wasn\u2019t the right thing to put him out there, not knowing 100 per cent that he was good to go.\u201d<\/p>\n
It comes at a time when the Rhinos have lost young halfback Jack Brown. The teenage halfback underwent surgery due to a knee injury in the week and is now set for a long spell on the sidelines.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt could be quite lengthy, they\u2019re talking four or five months. I\u2019m not sure if he will play again this year, it will just depend on his rehab. There\u2019 certainly no rush, he\u2019s only young and want to give him every opportunity.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe can work on other areas of his game. He can start to put a bit of work into his upper body and get a bit thicker and stronger because he certainly showed that he was tough enough and handled it physically. But if he can just put a bit more weight on up top, that\u2019ll be his mentality at the moment.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s one of those ones where you can try and rush him through and push it and if he was 30-odd and he was getting to the end of his career, you might want to take a few chances with it.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut he\u2019s young and he\u2019s got a lot of time in front of him. It\u2019s a bit of a real blow that, isn\u2019t it? Just Hull, obviously, on Sunday. Yeah, the effort\u2019s been really good and they\u2019re trying hard and I feel like they\u2019re defending really well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Arthur confirmed the Rhinos would not be looking to bring in a replacement to fill Brown\u2019s position in the squad, with Bird and Chris Hankinson both capable of playing in the halves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jack Bird will make his Leeds Rhinos debut against Hull FC, while Brodie Croft will make his return…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":486568,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-486567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=486567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/486568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}