‘Punched in the face’: Robbo’s savage Mike Tyson message to Roosters after wake-up call rout

“Get harder.”

That was the message from coach Trent Robinson and Roosters skipper James Tedesco following the club’s heavy 40-4 defeat at home.

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The Roosters were on the wrong end of a Panthers’ attacking flurry in the first half that they could not stop with Penrith scoring 22 points in 13 minutes to take the game away.

Tedesco recalled how it felt being on the receiving end of the Panthers barrage.

“I feel like in periods we were on top, we made some linebacks and we were playing some good footy but they took advantage of a couple of individual errors or tackles straight away,” Tedesco said.

“You want to stay positive, but we’ve got to get harder in those periods, especially against top teams like that because they’ll punish you

“We weren’t hard enough in the second half. We let too many tries in and we didn’t threaten them at all, so that was disappointing.

“We’ll have to have a good look at ourselves for the quick turnaround next week.”

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Robinson agreed with his skipper, using a slight variant of a famous Mike Tyson quote to hammer his point home.

“There were shades (of what we wanted to do). We will ask questions but the Mike Tyson quote around ‘everyone can fight until they get punched in the face’, well we got punched in the face and didn’t fight back. We might have danced around but it’s clear what we need to do.

“He (Teddy) is 100% right and we need to action it rather than talk about it.”

Early in the game the Roosters were well on top, almost forging a two-try lead, but as Robinson noted, his side went away from what was working.

“We talked about the way that we wanted to attack there and I felt like we went in and executed that quite well right from the start before that period where we let in (four) tries,” he said.

“We went back to a system that was looking for shorter term joy rather than sort of working at play after play and you need to build a pressure there and we didn’t get back to that.”