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Watch to see what Parramatta Eels coach Brad Arthur had to say about his side’s 28-14 loss to the Newcastle Knights.
On the first ten minutes
“They out enthused us at the start. We knew they were going to come out nice hard and fast and we weren’t prepared to do the same early,” Arthur said.
“The boys have been around long enough, they knew exactly what the situation was. We knew how important our start was, we didn’t have any ball, but we led to that as well,” he said.
“Maybe we just thought it was going to happen and that we didn’t have to work as hard to make it happen,” he said.
“We have to come with a better attitude to our start and no just go in and see what happens. We need to start hard. They probably did everything harder than us,” Arthur said.
On fighting back
“The pleasing thing is that it took us 25 minutes to roll up our sleeves and play well. After that we found a way to make our way back into the game and put ourselves in a position. A lot of the 50/50s didn’t go our way; you have to earn them too and we didn’t,” Arthur said.
“We did the same when we went down to Canberra. At some stage your execution will get affected at the end of the game because you have used up so much juice early, you don’t have quite the same intent to carry the ball. You can’t have 25 per cent possession at the end of the day,” he said.
“The pleasing thing is at least we had plenty of fight and spirit, we kept coming, but we left it too late and did too much work early,” Arthur said.
On the Knights first try
“It’s just a judgement thing. He was probably trying to look after his forwards but it would have been better to just tap it out and back ourselves,” Arthur said.
On whether contract talks are distractive
“No definitely not. We won last week and there was the same talk then. If we didn’t have any fight in us today, maybe, but there was plenty of fight at the back end. We worked harder to try and get a rub of the green,” Arthur said.
“We play a professional game and these blokes are paid to play professional football and roll up every week and put their bodies on the line and that’s what I was proud about today and we have to do it again next week,” Arthur said.
On Ferguson playing in fullback for part of the game
“We’ve been doing that for our six games, just using him in bits and pieces, try and throw some variation to our attack so yeah, we have been doing that since round,” Arthur said.
