He conceded Parramatta’s second-half fightback is a sign they are a different animal than past seasons – but an unimpressed Brad Arthur declared there was no excuse for the Eels’ 22-18 loss to Manly on Saturday night.
The Eels arrived at Lottoland as prohibitive favourites to topple the injury-ravaged hosts.
But the ladder-leaders were immediately on the back foot when Martin Tapau scored the first of the Sea Eagles’ four first-half tries in just the second minute.
Arthur’s men held the hosts scoreless and ran in three unanswered second-half tries but ultimately fell short in a thrilling finish.
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The Eels were missing Mitchell Moses (calf) for the third straight game and had won six of their seven games since the COVID-19 break.
But Arthur refused to blame the absence of their star playmaker or an emotional letdown for the Round 10 slip up against their arch-rivals.
“I don’t care, unlucky,” Arthur quipped.
“The good teams keep getting themselves up all the time.
“We want to be a good team, we’ve played some reasonable football and teams are going to come after us so we’ve got to be prepared for it.
“… We knew exactly what we were walking into and we prepared for it but we weren’t prepared to do anything about it when we got here.
“We let in three tries in 12 minutes at the start so our attitude wasn’t there from the start.”
Arthur added of the Eels’ shocking start to the contest: “We’ve worked so hard and in the space of 10 minutes you undo it all with some soft efforts on the tryline.
“… The tries that we allowed at the start of the game were soft, I can’t say it any other way.”
But the renowned task master admitted his players’ resilience after the interval was a good sign for the premiership contenders.
“Well there’s a positive there, so we know that we’re a different footy team to what we have been in the past,” he said of the second-half fightback.
“And we talked about it and we thought that we could get enough points in the second half but we had to keep them scoreless.
“… So that’s a positive sign for us but you can’t give good teams, or any team, a start like that.”
Meanwhile, Arthur declared star forward Nathan Brown is in doubt for Thursday’s clash against the Wests Tigers with a ‘pretty bad cork’.
“But allayed fears over winger Maika Sivo who left the contest after a heavy hit from Brad Parker late in the second half.
“I think they (medical staff) said he was alright, yeah,” Arthur said of Sivo.
