A despondent Ricky Stuart bluntly declared the Canberra Raiders had no business being in the NRL finals following their season-ending 40-16 loss to the Sydney Roosters on Thursday night.
The Raiders entered the Round 25 clash needing to defeat Trent Robinson’s depleted line-up and have Cronulla lose to a Melbourne side missing a host of stars on Friday to steal eighth spot on the NRL ladder.
With their season on the line, the Green Machine opened the scoring in the fifth minute and could have tripled their lead.
But a dream start turned into a nightmare in Mackay as the Chooks ran in six unanswered tries from the 24th to the 75th minute to climb back into fourth spot.
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“We started so well, we were flying through the middle there and every time we got up their end we created an opportunity,” an agitated Stuart said post-match.
“We scored a try and had two opportunities dropped, it could have been three tries.
“And I’m not being disrespectful to the Roosters, they’ve had a tough year and have done a really good job getting to where they are, but if we can’t beat that team out there tonight we’re only wasting another week being up here.
“I’d rather go home and see the families because if we couldn’t beat that team, Christ, we’d only be waiting for another week to get beat.”
Stuart added of the disappointing end to a tumultuous campaign: “It’s an empty feeling, it’s a shocking feeling because I think we’re a better team than where we’ve ended up on the table.
“But we are where we are and it’s all because of that middle part of the season where we had a really bad slump, lost all of our mojo and form and I think we were two-from-12.
“Realistically we probably didn’t even deserve to be fighting for the eight tonight and we were poor tonight, we were really poor.”
Pressed on whether he saw any concerning signs in the lead-up to the must-win clash, Stuart replied: “No, no, there’s games like that where you don’t see that coming.
“We got to the sideline ready to go, the boys prepared well and I can’t blame our defence tonight, our attack was dreadful.
“… In the second half we just took so many wrong options in attack, we didn’t give ourselves a chance to attack because we took the wrong options with the football.”
