Mannering hopes to stop Warriors rot

In the 22-year history of the Warriors, there’s never been a player who’s been through more tough times than Simon Mannering, but he keeps coming back for more.

The 30-year-old who missed the losses against the Panthers and Dragons over the past couple of rounds because of a hamstring injury, will take to the field again on Saturday night when the Warriors host the Broncos.

He admits he’s found it tough watching the team struggle over the past couple of weeks, feeling helpless that he couldn’t help out.

‘‘I haven’t watched many from the sidelines,’’ said Mannering, who’ll be playing his 268th game for the club this weekend.

‘‘But it’s a lot harder watching than playing and I get much more nervous.

‘‘It because I don’t have any control over what happens and when things don’t go well you feel for the guys because you couldn’t help them.’’

Mannering has only been involved in playoff footy in four of the 12 years he’s been at the club and he could be forgiven for wishing he played for a more successful team, like Storm or Roosters.

However, he’s never given much serious consideration to leaving each time his contract has come up for renewal and he remains optimistic about what the team can achieve this year, despite their slow start.

‘‘You definitely learn a lot more from the hard times than the good times,’’ he said.

‘‘Obviously, during my career it would have been nice to had a lot less of those hard times.

‘‘I’ve learned so much from them, but it is unfortunate that we sometimes find ourselves back in the same position that we’ve been in before.

‘‘When you make mistakes you want to learn from them and unfortunately we’ve repeated them at times.

‘‘But I’m always optimistic and positive about where you can go to from these points, because us players, we’re the ones who’ve got control over it, so it’s only us who can get ourselves out of it.

‘‘There’s no point in us looking externally, we’ve got to find it within ourselves to turn things around.’’

One reason that’s been pushed forward as to why the Warriors might be able to end their losing streak this weekend is before Mannering is back.

Earlier this week, Kieran Foran described him as an irreplaceable person in the team.

So it’s all down to the lock to be the team’s saviour then is it?

‘‘I don’t think I would have made much difference the last two weeks,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s more of a team performance than anything.

Despite the dreadful last 120 minutes of footy, this isn’t a dreadful Warriors team. They’re not the Knights.

They’ve shown in patches this year that they can play well, as demonstrated in their win over the Roosters. But that makes this current bad patch all the more frustrating for their supporters.

‘‘Even the game we’ve lost against quality opposition, we still played decent footy,’’ Mannering said.