NRL greats have been lining up to tear strips off the Wests Tigers since their limp round two defeat to Newcastle – but is the tide going to turn anytime soon?
It’s clear something isn’t working. Rumours of Luke Brooks wanting to leave have plagued the club through the off-season, the goal line defence has been catastrophic over the first two weeks, and Michael Maguire looks powerless to fix it.
Benji Marshall asserted post-match that what his old club had dished up wasn’t first-grade standard.
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“There’s probably areas of that,” Maguire replied when presented with the comments.
He had been scathing in his own right earlier in the afternoon at the post-match press conference, labelling the performance ‘disappointing’.
“We put it upon ourselves right at the start of the game – the defence side of things was lacking at the start. It rolled into poor completions and you put pressure on yourself,” he said.
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“What’s frustrating is I know what this group is capable of, to be honest. We’ve shown it, we’ve said what we want to do, but we need to own our own areas of our game and make sure the team has the success is build pressure.”
What will be most frustrating about the loss to the Knights is that for the first half of their round one clash with Melbourne, the Tigers were well and truly on the front foot.
But as was often the case last year, their defence wilted at the first signs of pressure as Jahrome Hughes engineered a comeback win.
A tight loss to Melbourne, who’ve never lost in round one, is nothing to be ashamed of – but what transpired on Sunday was close to inexcusable.
“They’ve got to find a way to be competitive,” Cameron Smith said on SEN on Monday.
“Where was the fight we had seen from round one? Did the players find it easier to get up for round one because it’s Melbourne?”
The sad part is, expectations for Tigers fans were relatively low in 2022 – many were already looking ahead to next season, with the shrewd signings of Isaiah Papali’i and Api Koroisau already confirmed.
But it remains to be seen who, if any, of the current regime are there to greet them. Maguire was a fantastic coach for the Rabbitohs in his first three seasons with the club, but his hardline approach to man management gradually wore the squad down before he departed in 2017, having missed the finals in back-to-back years.
The Tigers are now in year four of the Maguire tenure, and it seems that they’re only getting the bad parts of his Bunnies tenure, without the dizzying highs of top four finishes and grand final success.
As Brad Fittler pointed out on Sunday, the next few weeks may well be make-or-break.
“They’ve got the Warriors next week, they’ve got the Titans, and then the Sharks. Three teams they would’ve said we’ll give ourselves a chance (to beat).
“I don’t think Round 2 is panic stations. We’ll see how they’re placed after Round 5.”
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