Ricky Stuart has unloaded on the Canberra Raiders after Anzac Round, telling his players there was no excuse for the errors that allowed the Wests Tigers to come back and beat his side at Leichhardt and warning that the club's finals hopes are being handed away one set at a time.
Speaking in the Raiders' post-match press conference, Stuart did not attempt to dress up a loss that put his side's premiership aspirations under fresh pressure. Asked about the individual mistakes that preceded every Tigers try, he was blunt. "No, there's no excuse," Stuart said. "We put ourselves in a position to win the game. I think I'm right, but you go back and have a look at the set of six before they scored each try. We've made an error. So you give them field position, you giving them more ball. It's not good enough."
For a coach who has made accountability a central theme of his Raiders tenure, Stuart refused to accept that Canberra's long casualty list was the story of the night. "It's not a team thing. It's an individual thing," he said. "So the individual's got to be accountable for it. It's just not good enough. One hundred per cent the effort's there. There's a ton of effort tonight. But I expect that if you want to play at this level, that's the standard and the level of effort you got to have. It's just not on, all the errors we continue to make."
Pressed on whether the problem was simply that his players were pushing passes that were not on, Stuart agreed without softening it. "Yes, you saw him," he said. "We already got four players out. They just got to fix it."
The Raiders started well, but Stuart pinpointed the moment the game got away from his side as the period when Canberra traded a controlled arm-wrestle for a string of unforced errors. "We started to get a set for set game," he said. "We went set for set. Happy got 10 minutes. I think we scored a try in that period. But we put them, we had the game in a cycle where we were going set for set. We're happy to go set for set, and that's what the game's about. Then you make a poor soft error, give a stupid penalty away, and they score off the back of it. So it comes back on us."
Stuart's frustration with self-inflicted pressure was the loudest theme in a short, cold press conference. "You can't give a good attacking team like the Tigers more possession than they deserve for our errors," he said.
He did offer credit to the match officials for a disciplined refereeing performance in what was a physical, emotional Anzac contest. "Very few six-agains against you," he said. "I thought that was a great referendum in regards to the six-agains because he was pinging players from both teams."
For a Raiders side that sat inside the top eight earlier in the year, the message from Stuart was unusually pointed. Effort, he repeated, is not the problem. The execution, and in particular the habit of conceding field position on the set immediately before an opposition try, has begun to cost Canberra real points.
The coach's warning, only half-joked, may yet echo in the rest of the Green Machine's Round 8 review. "Address it," Stuart said, "that they can book their end-of-season holidays a lot earlier if we don't start fixing our errors."
