Michael Maguire used the most familiar coaching phrase in the NRL handbook on Saturday night, and he did so in the room where it carries the most weight — a Wests Tigers post-match press conference after a third consecutive defeat. The Tigers had been outmuscled by the New Zealand Warriors with a 10-1 first-half penalty count that effectively decided the contest, and Maguire was in no mood to dance around it.
"There were definitely things there that were in our control," Maguire said. "But there's also things there that I definitely need to have a look at — I think it was 10 penalties to one at one stage." The head coach said he understood the boundary between a coach's complaint and a coach's responsibility, and he was at pains not to cross it. "When you look at rucks and you look at the opposition, you're looking for the consistency around what was going on there. We wear some of those penalties — but there were some there that, yeah, just make the game hard to play when you're playing all that."
The shape of the contest, by Maguire's reading, was set by Wests' early discipline failures. "We actually had some field position there, and I thought when we had the ball — we've got to find ways where the possession can swing our way," he said. "We had that sort of to-and-fro at the start of the game. We gave away a couple of penalties, and then all of a sudden we're planted on their line. So, getting some good tackling practice down close to our line at the moment."
His frustration was not directed only at the officiating; it was directed at the trajectory the team had developed since coming off a stretch of better results. "It was only two or three weeks ago that things were in a better place from how things were being adjudicated and how we were doing things," Maguire said. "So we haven't shifted too far, but we've got to make sure that we work out where the shifts come from."
The Tigers boss revealed that match referee Adam Gee had warned him, and that he had passed the warning on to his playing group. "He warned me and told me to give the team a warning, which I did," Maguire said. "And I thought the warning was for repeated offences, but it wasn't anything to do with holding down or slowing the ruck inside the 10-metre zone. That's ultimately what [the Tigers prop] Patty got sin-binned for. We had a number of things where it was an escort or something other than a ruck infringement. So I tried to get some clarity, but that's as far as I went."
With the Tigers' rolling injury crisis adding to the mix — long-term casualties already in the medical room before the night kicked off — captain Adam Doueihi delivered the player-level mea culpa that Maguire had pointedly stopped short of. "Like Mad said, we didn't give ourselves a chance in that first half," Doueihi said. "I came up with a couple of poor kicks, gave away seven tackles. Our discipline was poor. When you do that, I think they had 30-odd tackles in our 20 to our three. So 30 per cent possession — it's always going to be tough to be in games when it's like that. The attitude's there. We're fighting hard for one another, but we're certainly making it tough on each other. So we clean that up, we get a few things go our way, and I'm sure the results return."
The upcoming representative round bye, Maguire said, comes at a time the squad needs it. "The bye comes at a good time for us. To their credit, the boys are fighting," he said. "I'm really proud of how they go about what they're doing at the moment. We need to be better than that — what we did see out there today. But the boys will have the bye now, we'll get a fair few rolling back in over the next couple of weeks. The players that I've got out there, I know they're very capable of being better than what we showed tonight. Our discipline was just off tonight. When you put pressure on yourselves against a team like the Warriors, who are performing well, you're going to give some pressure back."
The diagnosis, then, is internal. The Tigers are not, in Maguire's view, miles off where they need to be. They are at fault on the small percentages — the kicks, the discipline, the ruck speed — that decide tight Saturday-night NRL games. The two-week reset is the gift. Maguire's job over those 14 days is to make sure his Tigers come back capable of converting that gift into the only currency that matters when a head coach's seat is being warmed by a third straight loss: a win, in front of the Tigers' members, on the next available Thursday night.
