Surgery for Leeds Rhinos ace: key player due back for 2027 season

Rhinos coach Brad Arthur revealed the positive news today (Monday) when the Betfred Super League play-offs were launched at Old Trafford. Levi suffered a neck injury in a defeat at Castleford Tigers on July 19. He made a brief comeback as a substitute against St Helens three weeks ago, but managed only 14 minutes on the field.

“Danny is having an operation today on his neck,” Arthur revealed. “We’ll get it fixed, I think it’s a two/three-month process; he probably won’t do any contact until the start of the new year, but he will be ready to go.”

Of Levi’s ill-fated return last month, Arthur reflected: “He had done everything, the club and the doctors had all done everything properly. Danny was comfortable and there was no pressure from us on him to play.

“There was probably more pressure on himself to try and get out there. Maybe he talked himself into thinking he was better than he was. Typical footballers, the hard thing is protecting them from themselves. On reflection we are just lucky it didn’t come back to bite him permanently.”

Arthur confirmed Rhinos came through last week’s 18-12 home loss to Hull FC unscathed and James McDonnell will return from a pectoral muscle injury in the play-off semi-final a week on Friday. “We are good,” the coach said.

“I am not looking forward to it, but I am going to have to have a tough conversation with someone over the weekend or on Monday, one of our forwards. James Mac will be back in the team so one of our forwards is going to miss out. I don’t like that part of it, but it’s my job. All the boys have worked hard, but that’s the fortunate position we are in.”

Winger Maika Sivo (broken arm) and loose-forward Keenan Palasia (foot) both returned from long-term injury against Hull and Arthur added: “They are good. With Maika, you could see the first time he got pushed into touch he didn’t want to get his fend out. He was a bit apprehensive at the start, but once he got into it and started to get confidence back in his arm, he was all right.

“Keenan was really good. I was only going to keep him out there for 15 minutes, but he played 25 straight. For a bloke who hasn’t done a lot of on-feet conditioning work, he was good and he will be better for it.”

Rhinos trained today for the first time since the loss to Hull which brought their regular-season campaign to a halt. “They are disappointed and they were a bit sheepish this morning,”Arthur said.

“We went through our process of our normal review, which we do win or lose and the thing that came out of it was we created more than enough opportunities. We bombed quite a few tries.

“Some of our skill was just lacking a little bit, which has been unusual for us. That led to a bit of frustration and we gut a couple of things wrong defensively, they got a couple of soft tries off a kick and a drop out.

“Hopefully it is a learning process for us. At the end of the day, the big outcome is we have done a lot of work and a lot of good things to get to being 80 minutes away from Old Trafford. The only thing that’s going to matter now or people are going to remember is how we play next week.

“We’ve looked at it and put it aside. We did a bit of training this morning, we’ll have a good session tomorrow and we’ve got a bit of an opposed session on Friday to try and keep it as normal as we can.”