Warriors coach Nathan Brown has told critics of the club’s younger players to be mindful of how young some of them are after the club’s humiliating 70-10 loss to the Melbourne Storm.
Despite the record loss, Brown on Wednesday said he was reluctant to make too many changes to his team after dropping Ed Kosi as the only non-forced change to the side to face the Raiders on Saturday.
Nathan Brown did defend some of the club’s younger players, saying critics needed to be mindful of how young many of them are. (Source: 1News)
"It’s hard to argue with people being very critical when these things happen," Brown said of the record loss, in which the Warriors conceded 54 second-half points.
"Myself, I’m the head coach, I’ve got to take a huge chunk of that responsibility," said Brown, who has won 42% of games in 14 seasons as an NRL coach with the Dragons, Knights and Warriors.
READ MORE: Warriors drop winger as one non-forced change after Storm mauling
"As I just said with young Kosi, people need to be mindful that some of these boys are young and whilst being in a high-performance sport comes with responsibility.
"It is fair for people to be critical of these younger boys but just be mindful that they are young and they are still learning their trade."
Brown said he was not prepared to throw away what he labelled progress they had made in the four weeks prior to the Storm game, because of one nightmare half in Melbourne.
"If I’m being honest we felt as a club that we’d just gone down three tries to two to the Roosters and won three games on the bounce before that so we certainly felt like we were heading in the right direction," Brown said.
"We can’t go and make mass changes on one half of footy. There were some things that happened in the second half of the game in terms of an effort point of view. They’ve been made aware of that or will be made aware of, it’s not something that we want to have in our club or want to accept but the most changes all the time are not the answer I don’t think.
"In Ed’s case, he had a really tough day and it certainly knocked him around a little bit. Giving Ed a week off is probably the best thing, not only for us as a footy team but also Ed himself to get his head around it and get himself going again."
READ MORE: Some Warriors players gave up during thumping by Storm - Brown
The Warriors coach also clarified his post-game comments that some players had given up.
"Giving up can be done in different ways, some people get really down on themselves and withdraw from the competition, not because they deliberately do it," he said.
"Sometimes they feel if they don’t put themselves in a situation they can’t bugger up."
Brown said most of the discussions so far this week had been on an individual basis, but he was confident he was going to put a team out there against the Raiders on Saturday afternoon "that is more than capable".
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