Sea Eagles coach Anthony Seibold has slammed his side’s “disappointing” lack of effort after going down to the Eels 34-4 in a “frustrating” display.
An early sin bin to fullback Kaeo Weekes saw Brad Arthur’s side score two quickfire tries and from there, Manly were on the back foot.
Seibold believes the Sea Eagles “need to be better” in a sobering reality for a side that are considered premiership contenders.
“Really frustrating night, at the moment we take one step forward and two steps back, that’s where we are at as a group,” Seibold said in the post-match press conference.
“We just couldn’t handle the chaos of that early sin binning, I think we scored two tries while he was in the sin bin.
“Then it was a tough old night for us from there, a really frustrating night.”
The Sea Eagles were without key duo Daly Cherry-Evans and Tom Trbojevic who were away on Origin duty.
But that wasn’t an excuse for Seibold who pointed to Parramatta also missing their regular starting halves in Mitchell Moses and Dylan Brown.
“That’s not why we lost the game, we need to be better than that,” Seibold said.
“They are big losses, but they are missing Mitchell Moses and Dylan Brown as well.
“It’s not an excuse for us. We’ve shown a lot of effort and toughness this year, even in the games we haven’t been great... we’ve been tough and hung in.
“But we weren’t as good at the effort part of the game tonight which was the most disappointing part of our game.”
In Round 15, Manly delivered an eye-watering performance to pile 58 points on the NRL’s newest franchise, the Dolphins.
Fast forward a week and Seibold’s side could only manufacture a single try in a poor attacking display.
Seibold believes the Sea Eagles need to “close the gap” between their best and worst performances to find consistency.
“At the moment our best halves of footy and our worst halves of footy are too far apart and we are trying to close the gap,” Seibold said.
“At our best we have been really good, but sometimes we put too much pressure on ourselves and I think all four of their tries in the first half came off the back of our errors.
“We’d cough up the footy and we are then on our tryline.
“We hung though in that second half, but we weren’t good enough at the effort part of the game.”
