TONY Smith said players’ attitude was in no way to blame for the way a red-hot Leeds Rhinos side sent Wolves scurrying to their highest defeat of the season.

In fact, he said he took offence at Warrington Guardian’s question in the press conference and added it was methods and technique that were off-track on another night where injuries caused Wolves issues.

Leeds piled on 25 points in the final 26 minutes.

Smith said: “No way, you saw some of those boys run their blood to water at times to stop tries.

“Give a bit of credit over to who they were up against. They’ve some exceptional broken-field runners there that can wrong-foot the best of them when you’re on top of things.

“No way in the world did I for a moment think that people weren’t trying out there.

“I take a bit of offence to that, I really do. I wouldn’t question them.

“Anybody that’s played and has been on the back end of when things go wrong for you, it’s hard to stop.

“I thought we did well to scramble as much as we did and get back onside to stop tries.

“You don’t see people stopping tries like Zak Hardaker’s try without trying their hearts out.

“Please, don’t question my players about that. Momentum’s a big thing in rugby league and it was going against us today. It’ll go our way at some stage as well.

“Please don’t question desire or effort, you can question methods sometimes and technique and all those sorts of things and that’s what we were lacking tonight.

“Some of our hit-and-stick in tackles wasn’t good enough and we didn’t control the ruck speed enough and stop the ball from being offloaded.

“We had some young people out there, we’ve got some people carrying injury at the moment.

“I’m not excuse-making, that’s just how it is at the moment.

“When we get back to some of our best, and we’ve shown that at different stages this year – when we fire we can beat anybody so we’ll be aiming up again next week.”

Smith revealed how Wolves lost prop Anthony England midway through the first half with a hyper extended elbow, a similar injury to earlier in the year on his other arm and the ligament damage is set to keep him on the sidelines for a number of weeks.

Smith said: “It was another injury that left us down to three subs halfway through the first half.

“It makes it tough when you’re up against a team that is in great form on the evening.

“When you can’t rotate your players and get some of those kids off at different stages it hurts you. They can rack up a score.”

Smith said it was the best he has seen this year from the table-topping Rhinos, who Wolves had beaten twice during the first stage of the Super League season.

“That was pretty exceptional,” he said.

“That’s the best I’ve seen the Rhinos probably all year. They’ve been good and very good in games at times but I thought tonight they were exceptional.

“I thought they were really good against Saints (Challenge Cup semi final last week) to start the game and then fell away.

“They didn’t fall away tonight. They kept it up and they were rampant.

“All their dangerous players were very very dangerous. I thought Watkins was outstanding in the first half in particular but he was dangerous all game.

“Zak was fantastic and the two wingers. And I thought Danny McGuire rolled back the years as well.

“Their forwards were good. They offloaded and we struggled to contain their offload. Our contact wasn’t very good tonight.

“We’ve been pretty good in contact the last six or seven weeks really. They challenged us in that area and came up trumps.

“I don’t know many teams would have competed with Rhinos tonight the way they were.”