‘Brain dead’: Benji Marshall apologises to fans after 68-0 Tigers ‘embarrassment’
As if the 80-minute demolition by the Panthers wasn’t painful enough.
Wests Tigers head coach Benji Marshall has endured a torturous six-minute press conference as he tried to make sense of the club’s disastrous 68-0 shellacking at CommBank Stadium.
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“It’s embarrassing, that’s the first thing,” Benji Marshall declared of the 12-try hammering.
“I don’t usually apologise to our fans and members, but that performance was just unacceptable — I’m actually surprised they stuck around as long as they did.”
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Marshall admitted the signs were ominous almost from the opening whistle of the lop-sided match.
“It was clear to me from the start we weren’t there, and we need to take accountability for that and figure out why that happened,” he said.
“I get we’re playing the top team in the league but there are some things there you just can’t accept.
“Everything in our game we could possibly get wrong, we got wrong.”
‘We were so dumb with the ball’ says Benji
Marshall continue to unload on his team’s woeful performance with a brutal assessment that featured some of the strongest public language the head coach has used in his time in charge at Concord.
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“It looks with that scoreline like we’re not trying — we were so dumb with the ball and we can’t defend our errors, (we were) tackling so much then we get brain dead and we can’t compete.”
Asked about what happens now, Marshall once again didn’t mice his words, especially around his team’s shattered defence.
“I’m real concerned,” he said.
“Last week we turned up with a real defensive resolve — and that was non-existent today.”
“We’ll go back and look at what we did as coaches and see what we need to be better at, because there’s obviously something that went amiss from last week to this week in what we did preparation wise.”
Trailing the Panthers 36-0 at half time, the final 68-0 result was the second largest losing margin in the NRL era and the equal fifth largest defeat in more than a century of NSWRL and NRL.
The Tigers hosts the Titans at Leichhardt Oval in NRL Round 15 next Sunday afternoon.
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