NEIL Turley's stunning start to the season might have caught one or two by surprise, but not his head coach Paul Terzis.

Even before he'd made his senior debut, Terzis had marked Turley down as a potential star of the future.

"You only had to see him in training to see what talent he had," explains Terzis.

"He had a bad time last year because of a serious knee injury but he's fought back well and got a new lease of life now he's joined us here at Leigh. He's a local lad and plays with local pride."

Terzis was quick to praise Turley's 36-point demolition of Chorley last Sunday - only his fifth senior game in Leigh colours.

Turley has now clocked up 10 tries, including hat-tricks in successive matches and has touched down at least once in each of the last four games. In addition he's landed nine goals from 11 shots.

"Turley has been an outstanding success for the team and has really softened the blow of losing Stuart Donlan to Halifax.

"His positional play is right up there with the best because he reads the game so well. And when he fields a kick, he's always capable of running it back 70-80 metres. He also knows where the tryline is.

"Even though he scored five tries at Chorley, he knows that he could have had a couple more. But the heart-warming thing is that this kid is only going to get better and better."

Terzis was remained upbeat despite Leigh making more mistakes last Sunday that they had in the four previous games put together.

"We did try to force things that weren't on and our handling wasn't as good as it should have been but if somebody had offered us 56 points at the start, we'd have taken it.

" And let's give full credit to Chorley who didn't oll over and die. They showed tremendous commitment and character and kept having a go at us. But the big difference was that we have the quality and class and made it count to score 10 tries."