Arthur: We didn’t give up

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Parramatta Eels coach Brad Arthur said he was pleased his team didn't give up after going down to the Roosters 24-10 in their first defeat of the NRL season.

Here's what Arthur said in his post match press conference.

Thoughts on the result

“The effort was there and it probably was a good game of football to watch, but they were just too professional for us in the end. It was 10-8 and I think we only had the ball for four or five sets after that period to their 13," Arthur said.

"On the back of points (our try), their first set with the ball we came outside our systems in defence and let the try (Tupou) through and the try was too easy," he said.

On what went wrong in second half

"It was one set. We had all the momentum and then one set there we went out of our systems in defence and they went straight through them and scored. From there, they just starved us of the ball," Arthur said.

"We fought our way back in. Even in the first half we didn’t really build any pressure and then once we were able to build some pressure at the start of the second half we got a couple of rewards from it.

"We were prepared to go set for set for a while at the back end with maybe 20 minutes to go. It was going to be a tough 20 minutes but we only had 30-40 per cent of the ball late in the game," he said.

What Arthur said to the team at half time

“We scrambled well and kept turning up and kept them to one try when they had a fair bit of ball at our try line. We made 70 odd tackles more than them in the first half so I was happy with the start of our second half with the effort. It didn’t seem to tax us too much but at the end of the game maybe it showed," Arthur said.

Did the game show Eels are genuine premiership contenders?

‘We have another tough game next week against Canberra so I’ll be able to answer that later on once we know if we learned from a few of those situations we put ourselves in tonight," Arthur said.

What Arthur takes from the game

“We didn’t give up. I thought we had plenty of belief and once we got a bit of momentum we showed that we can be a reasonable football team. Just, you know, we would like to be more professional in closing that game out,” Arthur said. 

“We can go away and there were some big moments from the game that probably cost us; all their (Roosters') big moments, their completions and making their tackles. You know we were close to scoring and they’d scramble and make it hard for you," he said.