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Parramatta Eels coach Brad Arthur has made no excuses for his team's 19-0 loss in the nation's capital against the Canberra Raiders.
Blake Ferguson’s injury
“He got a whack in the ribs and it was early in the game and he tried to play on for us, got a needle but he just couldn’t do the properly so we had to make the change,” Arthur said.
“He will need to get x-rays tomorrow,” he said.
“His nose doesn’t look too good but I think they’re going to try to straighten it and he’ll be right next week,” he said.
Defence
“Yeah we made somewhere around 200 tackles in the first half. We defended our line for the first 20 minutes and we did a really good job and then I thought we scored a try and it was called back for a forward pass and I don’t think it was forward. It was a big call in the game for mine. It would have been nice if we put the ball under the post 6 nil after defending our line for 20 minutes,” Arthur said.
“We have to get better at not putting ourselves under pressure. Three tries and two of them on the fifth tackle off a kick and we put ourselves under that pressure. I thought they (Raiders) did a good job of building that pressure,” he said.
“I’m extremely proud of their try line defence, they scored off kicks and they were playing some really good football, Canberra so yeah it was a tough road trip and we have got to go back and regroup and try to make sure they keep coming with the same attitude and effort with their football but give ourselves a bit of a chance next time,” he said.
“We put pressure on ourselves and we contributed to the loss through ill discipline with the ball. They tried extremely hard in defence and with the amount of possession a few more tries could have been scored,” Arthur said.
Reshuffling the team
“Yeah sometimes that happens and they just have to roll with it. We were trying to work out what to do for a couple of minutes and it just is what it is, every team has to go through it and that’s not why we didn’t get the result we wanted. They controlled the game really well, they built pressure and we didn’t really build any pressure at all,” Arthur said.
The Raiders
“They were good, they competed hard, they controlled the football and showed a lot of patience and if they keep competing like that, they will be a hard team to beat especially down here. Ricky (Stuart) has obviously done a very good job with them and they played well,” Arthur said.
