Eels coach Jason Ryles said his team will “have to have a big schooner of reality and move on” after the NRL’s pre-season challenge winners crashed to a 52-4 defeat at the hands of Melbourne.
There was plenty of optimism surrounding Parramatta entering this season, and that was even before they were crowned champions of the league’s pre-season tournament.
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Ryles seemed to have got the Eels to turn a corner late last season, which coincided with halfback Mitchell Moses’ return from injury and the arrival of new recruit Jonah Pezet was only expected to add an extra element of unpredictability to Parramatta’s attack.
Pezet and Moses, however, were rendered near useless on Thursday night, given little ball to work with as the Eels struggled to complete their sets and instead gifted Melbourne prime field position.
The Storm turned that into 52 points and Ryles admitted it was a “very disappointing” start to the season, even if he could take some solace from the fact 2025 started in very similar fashion.
“It’s round one. Let’s not lose sight of that fact. But on the back of what Mitchell said and what we mentioned earlier… we sort of evolved ourselves to a standard of play that didn’t look like that tonight,” Ryles said of the loss, which was the worst of his short coaching career.
“Some really good lessons and we’ll just have to have a big schooner of reality and move on.”
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The biggest lesson, according to Ryles, was that if the Eels are serious about challenging for a top-eight spot they can’t give a quality team like the Storm so many opportunities on their own try-line.
“They’ve got three of the Test spine there and if you give them that much opportunity and don’t tackle well then you get what you deserve,” Ryles said.
“If you asked me before the game was it going to end up like that I would have definitely said no. I’ve obviously got to go and reflect on our preparation and what went well and what we need to work on.
“But the bottom line is we just didn’t give ourselves a chance tonight and they’re a quality opposition regardless of who they put out there. They’ve still got three of the four Test spine, which takes advantage of that.”
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It was a similar message from Moses, who said the Eels entered Thursday’s game “confident” of becoming the first team to beat a Craig Bellamy-coached team in round one.
Instead, self-inflicted wounds proved their undoing.
“We just didn’t complete,” Moses said.
“I don’t know how much per cent possession we had, but it didn’t feel like much. We didn’t end the sets where we wanted to, and we didn’t complete high at all.
“You complete low against a team like that here in Melbourne, that’s what happens.
“If you said that was what it was going to be at the start of the day, I would have told you you were crazy.
“We didn’t feel like that was going to happen. We came in confident and got our pants pulled down. We’ll have to go back to the drawing board so we can get better, and it doesn’t get much easier.”
Moses is right. The Eels travel to Brisbane next week, while they also take on the gritty Dragons in Round 3 followed by Western Sydney rivals Penrith.
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