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Parramatta Eels coach Brad Arthur has been brutally honest about his team’s 42-22 point loss to the Cronulla Sharks in at PointsBet Stadium.
He says the team needs to tackle better and be a full-time side.
Here’s what Arthur had to say during the post match press conference on Saturday night.
On losing Gutherson in the second minute
“It’s footy, it happens, it’s not great. You have Gowie (David Gower) at six and move Will (Smith) around but we have to decide whether we want to be a full-time team or a part time team. Full-time is all the time, every week,” Arthur said.
“We’re training well, we’re preparing well, but coming to games, when things don’t go quite our way … we need to harden up when things don’t go our way. When Gutho went down, things didn’t go our way, but it doesn’t matter, we just have to keep going,” Arthur said.
On whether the team made Gutherson’s departure as an excuse
“It’s there as an excuse if we want it to be, but just before half-time if we came in (at half-time) 14-6, we probably would have been okay. There are some football things we got wrong that were dumb, a lot of things that we did. There were some good things that we did, but you can’t start well one week and then dip the tail the next week. We scored 22 point and they were probably soft tries at the end, but defensively we just weren’t good enough. We need to make our tackles,” Arthur said.
On whether he will make changes to the team
“I don’t want to be changing the team every week because that doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t give you any continuity or combinations. I’m not going to make a decision tonight on whether I’m going to make changes, but there needs to be a change in our approach week in week out,” Arthur said.
On whether Moses needs more support in the halves
“Well it’s hard to be critical on him (David Gower). He probably had the best game of his career last week in the forwards and then one minute in, he’s looking forward to going on in the middle with a bit of confidence and then I move him to six. At the end of the day, we didn’t complete, some of our sets weren’t great and there is extra pressure on Mitchell to do that but you’ve got to tackle. At the end of the day all you have to do is run hard, tackle hard (and) see what happens,” Arthur said.
On Nathan Brown’s return
“I ran the gauntlet with him tonight giving him so much game time. That’s why I took him off at the end. Needed o be disciplined with that because we need to look at it long term. He’s too important for us. We leave him out there and he gets tired and sloppy and he throws his arm out so, I was more concerned about him individually and long term. He came on a tried to spark us. He hasn’t done a lot with the team, probably three sessions. If we had the right attitude we would have given him a chance to show us what he’s got,” Arthur said.
On Moses resigning with Eels
“It’s good for the club and we want to try to get all that stuff (contracts) sorted, but what needs to be better is our performance tonight. We have to be full-time footballers every week, not part-time,” Arthur said.
