Brown blasts ‘unacceptable’ Warriors performance
Warriors coach Nathan Brown said his team’s performance was ‘‘unacceptable’’, following the 20-18 loss to the Gold Coast Titans last night.
The round two game had a similar pattern to last weekend, a slow start, good middle period then a struggle to score at the end.
It took the Titans less than a minute to get their first try and they were up 12-0 after 14 minutes.
In the post-match press conference, a disappointed Brown said it wasn’t good enough from his players to fall behind so easily.
‘‘Both of our edges, their first two tries they got, they were from real slow play the balls,’’ Brown said.
‘‘It was just really poor, not good enough. Not good enough if you want to win games.
‘‘We’re past trying to develop players, we want to win bloody games of footy and that wasn’t acceptable.
‘‘It was obviously a good effort to get back into the game and then get in front, like we did last week.
‘‘But then we had two young outside backs drop the ball with the line open. Just purely and simply because they didn’t get deep enough.
‘‘Yeah, really disappointing.’’ The Warriors scored two tries late in the first half to take the lead, but failed to score another point, despite being the better team for most of that period. They did have chances to score, but blew them.
‘‘You can’t drop the ball with the line open twice,’’ Brown said.
‘‘If you get the ball with no one in front of you, catch it, you put it down and you score and we had two glaring ones.
‘‘We’ve got some talented young players, but they need to understand the consequences of not getting it right.’’
Both sides are better than they were last year, Brown said.
‘‘They’re a better team, we’re a better team, but we are still on nought points.’’
The Warriors’ cause wasn’t helped by the loss of Matt Lodge after 22 minutes. The big prop walked to the sideline at that point, vomited and never came back onto the field.
‘‘He’s really crook,’’ Brown said.
‘‘He didn’t let on that he was crook. He was vomiting before the game and I went to see him and wondered if he had nerves and he said he was crook.
‘‘With the heat, he had the shakes and that type of stuff, so we didn’t put him back out there.
‘‘We need to keep an eye on him, but hopefully everything is OK.’’
Although they don’t know what caused the illness, Brown was confident it wasn’t Covid-19.
‘‘You’ve got to test negative to play and he’s got tested every day this week and every day he’s come back good,’’ he said.
‘‘What he’s got, I’m not too sure. He’s got a big engine and he was tired after his 20 (minute) stint and obviously crook, spewing and vomiting, so great credit to him for playing and getting through what he did, but it wasn’t safe to put him back out there.’’