Bulls coach Brian Noble admitted he was baffled by referee Karl Kirkpatrick's display as defending Super League champions Leeds Rhinos romped to a record 42-12 victory at Odsal last night.

Noble stopped short of singling out Kirkpatrick's inept and at times bizarre display as a reason for his side's crushing defeat but he struggled to conceal his fury after Karl Pratt and Iestyn Harris were penalised for dissent at key times while a professional foul from Richard Mathers and a spear tackle from Nick Scruton attracted only the same punishment.

"I don't know, it has got me beat," said Noble.

"All Karl Pratt did was raise his hands. How many thousands of times do we see that?

"Anybody who knows me knows I am a strict disciplinarian but, come on, this is rugby league and players have the right to ask a question."

The Bulls opened each half with tries, from Karl Pryce and Stuart Reardon respectively, but the turning point came when Lee Radford was chopped down a metre short by a high tackle from Mathers.

Instead of awarding the penalty try and dispatching Mathers to the sin bin, Kirkpatrick awarded only a penalty and the Rhinos ran away with the game with three tries in ten minutes.

"I am certainly not going to focus on the official but some of the penalties he gave in the first half had me scratching my head, to say the least," said Noble.

"But the official was not the reason we lost. We weren't quite as organised with the ball as we'd like to be and in the second half we tried too hard to put things right.

"We will look at a couple of their tries and there will probably be a couple of forward passes in there but that was not the reason they scored. They made the breaks and then flooded through in numbers.

"As a coach you have to look at why that is happening, not so much the forward passes, although one of those tries did take them three scores away and you are just not going to get back into the game against a team of that quality."

Kevin Sinfield scored a try and enjoyed a perfect night with the boot, converting all seven Rhinos tries. Chev Walker and Gareth Ellis cancelled out Pryce's early intercept before a double from Rob Burrow and tries by Mark Calderwood, Keith Senior and Sinfield completed the rout.