Jason Demetriou has blasted his side for continually shooting themselves in the foot with some dumb football in their calamitous 28-18 loss to the Broncos in Round 2.
Souths slumped to an 0-2 start to their 2024 campaign and next face the Roosters in a horror draw and while Demetriou couldn’t fault his side’s effort he was livid with their skill execution.
“Yeah, I thought it would just really, like I said to the boys in there, I couldn’t fault our defensive effort,” Demetriou said.
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“I thought our defensive effort in the end result was outstanding, but we’re just shooting ourselves in the foot.
“You know, whether it’s, we can’t feed the scrum properly or first tackle errors, kicking it into our own player, penalties for blocking, just like, it was a horror show of just really little things that just kept putting pressure on ourselves.
“So doing that, we bottle that effort and that desire and tidy up some of that stuff then and see how good this footy team is.
“Because I was really pleased with our toil on defence in particular. We’re asked to do a hell of a lot of it and it was a big improvement from last week.”
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Demetriou believes Souths’ biggest issue is losing concentration in key moments, especially in good field position.
“It’s concentration, it’s one generally leads to two, two leads to three because we’re not concentrating and fatigue is getting in,” Demetriou said.
“And I think we just, like I said, it’s individuals that are going to own their roles. You know, what’s, like I said, a scrum feed or a first tackle error.
“We played without Cookie for 10 minutes before half time and our defensive resolve during that period was outstanding.
“It allowed us to come out with some momentum and get to 12-all and started looking like the footy team we want to be, but we just didn’t give ourselves a chance from that point on.
“You know, it’d be under 50% completion from that point on. And we just asked ourselves to do too much defending and then you can’t play footy off the back of that because you’re exhausted.
“But you know, they scored three tries from kicks on tackle five as well. So we got to tidy that up.”
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Demetriou refused to be drawn on a tough penalty on Sean Keppie for blocking the defenders from pressuring the kicker.
“I don’t know,” Demetriou said.
“To be honest, I can’t really comment on it till we look at it a bit more about the game. But like I said, if that was on its own, it’s not an issue.
“But there’s just five, six, seven things that add to that. That’s, like I said, we’ve locked them in a great defensive set. And then we charge down on play five inside their own 40 and give them another set.
“And then we work our backside off to defend that and get up the field. And then we kick it in the back of our own player.
“They’re just schoolboy areas. We’ve got to tidy them up. We tidy them up. We’ve got a very, very good footy side in there.”
Demetriou refused to use Souths’ tough draw to start the season as an excuse.
“It doesn’t matter who we play, we’ve got to get our stuff right,” Demetriou said.
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“When we get our stuff right, as we showed tonight in patches, we’re a very, very good footy side.
“But we can control what we can control. And that’s been our focus last week. It’ll be our focus next week. What do we do well? What do we want to keep improving on?
“And what are the things we need to tidy up? And like I said, we’re not going to beat anyone with 56% completions. So we’re going to take some ownership on that.
“Saying that the week before, we’re 80%. So we know we can do it. It’s got to get a combination of the two weeks and pull them together for 80 minutes.”
Demetriou is excited to have Jack Wighton returning form suspension in Round 3, but warned he wouldn’t be a silver bullet.
“It’s going to be his first game of the year, obviously, and we’re excited to have him making his debut for the club,” Demetriou said.
“And he gives us some experience on those edges and gives us some physicality as well. So, yeah, we’re looking forward to having him back.
“He’d be a big in for us, but again, we’ve got to tidy up the dumb things we did tonight. Get rid of the dumb stuff.
“Otherwise, Jack’s going to be doing like the rest of them we’re doing tonight and that’s tackling.”
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