Manly coach Des Hasler said his side will benefit from the week’s rest and will need to improve their first half effort for the bigger matches to come.
“I think there was a good lesson for all of us there in that first half, because the next game is going to be sudden death so we’ll take that on board and it gives us two weeks to freshen up and we’ll go again,” he said.
“It (first half) was uncharacteristic, certainly wasn’t the way we intended for it to go but this side’s got a lot of character.”
Hasler slammed the NRL’s decision to hold the match away from Brookvale.
“Yeah disappointing, didn’t work from that point of view,” Hasler said.
“If Manly are playing North Queensland it’s not a hard one is it to work out? We would have easy got 20,000 (at Brookvale).
“So 13,000 it’s probably 10,000, there’s probably a bit of fudging there I don’t know, but clearly there’s a lesson there … we all make mistakes.”
However, despite the small crowd, NRL chief executive David Gallop defended the reasons for playing the game at the SFS.
“The decision re the home finals was agreed by all clubs because you couldn’t have a situation where higher drawing Sydney teams were penalised and the lower drawing teams retained the home venue,” Gallop said.
Cowboys coach Neil Henry was offering no excuses for his team’s collapse.
“We were in the game the first 40, we played some very good footy but seven unanswered tries, it’s pretty hard to discuss how it happened,” Henry said.
“It was pretty comprehensive in the end which is disappointing.
“They were able to maintain their focus for 80 minutes and we weren’t.
“That blow out at the end, it’s a nightmare really.
“We expected to win, we didn’t come here hoping to win.”
Cowboys captain Thurston said he was “devastated” and “didn’t see it coming at all.”
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