We didn't play near well enough to win on Friday night in Auckland. Simple as that.
Tom Trbojevic 5/10 - Even when we had the majority of possession, Turbo struggled to get into the game with his usual impact, though he did give a nice pass to Suli for Garrick's second try.
Jorge Taufua 4/10 - Did some decent runs to help out the tiring forwards, but that's about it.
Brad Parker 3/10 - Lower score because he didn't get time to do much before injuring his knee literally doing nothing more than a tap re-start. His loss caused a major re-shuffle that didn't work.
Moses Suli 5/10 - Although he did run for 100 metres, Moses was fairly quiet against the Warriors.
Reuben Garrick 7/10 - Never gave up and was rewarded with a couple of good tries.
Dylan Walker 6/10 - Started at pivot, moved to centre and eventually went back to pivot. IMO Des should have left him at 5/8 after Parker went off because he actually looked a lot more comfortable there.
Daly Cherry-Evans 3/10 - Very poor in the first half with some dumb, panic play you don't expect from him. Settled down a bit in the second half, but still nowhere near enough. Did play injured for a fair period, but still not his best night out in maroon and white.
Addin Fonua-Blake 7/10 - Big minutes from AFB and was arguably our best forward in a beaten pack.
Api Koroisau 3/10 - We looked so much better with Fainu at dummy half. Api's poor passing also cost us at times, especially that dumb forward pass to Jake that killed the momentum we had at the end of the game.
Martin Taupau 7/10 - Like AFB was one forward that the Warriors struggled to contain.
Joel Thompson 6/10 - As usual, Thommo never gave up out there.
Curtis Sironen 4/10 - Fairly well contained by the Warriors.
Jake Trbojevic 5/10 - Jake never gives up, but I thought his impact on Friday was limited.
Manase Fainu 6/10 - We looked a lot more composed out of dummy half when he came on.
Corey Waddell 5/10 - Played mostly in the unfamiliar position of centre. Not bad, but like so many of his team mates, struggled to make an impact.
Morgan Boyle 4/10 - Limited time before going off for a HIA.
Taniela Paseka 4/10 - Another Manly forward well contained by the Warriors defence on the night.
We were very flat on Friday night in Auckland. The Warriors not only out-played us, but clearly out enthused us and that showed by the fact that it took until Adam Blair got sin-binned with 12 minutes to go for us to actually put points on the board, during which time the Warriors had already built up a match winning 18-0 lead. A telling story is that at one point during the game, Manly had 22 tackles in the opposition 20 metre zone late in the first half.....and had nothing to show for it. On the other side of the coin, the Warriors had 0 tackles in our 20 and had 3 tries.....18 points to show for their efforts.
They took the chances presented to them. We threw most of ours away until very late.
I've read so much that the refs allowed the Warriors to get away with things like laying all over the tackled player and that they weren't giving Manly a fair go. Then I look at the 12-5 penalty count in our favour and I am left thinking that blaming the referees for the loss is kinda clutching at straws.
The reality is that we just did not play well until we had a one player advantage with Blair in the bin. We put in some really dumb kicks (DCE on the first tackle of a 7 tackle set immediately springs to mind), some dumb passes and generally seemed to get back to the 2018 method of panicking when things didn't go our way.
Whichever way the side runs out on Thursday night against the Tigpies, I hope Des puts a rocket up their arses because heading into the Finals you want strong performances, not shaky ones that expose weaknesses. And we were shaky against the Warriors.
