Manly skipper Daly Cherry-Evans has broken his silence on his Queensland axing and swerved questions the Roosters have gone cold on him after the Sea Eagles loss to the Titans.
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Cherry-Evans put in a poor display in Manly’s horror 28-8 loss to the Titans capping a disappointing week for the Sea Eagles skipper after being axed by Billy Slater.
“The start of the week was tough, Sunday got the news, Monday had to go to training and face the boys,” Cherry-Evans said.
“After that it honestly started to feel normal. This is not the first time that I’ve been dropped from the Queensland side.
“So I guess I’ve had experience to take it on board and like I said pre-game, you can’t just worry about the things you can’t control, and the initial news was tough but yeah I moved on and thought we were going to come here tonight and play some really good footy.
“Based on our preparation, it looked like all the signs were there and unfortunately the most important part of the week is showing up on game day and we didn’t do that.”
Cherry-Evans was pressed on whether he saw his Origin axing coming but dodged the question.
“No, I just got the call on Sunday and then just, yeah, moved on from there,” Cherry-Evans said.
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“I think I got the call on Sunday which was tough and processed it pretty quickly during the week and moved on, and yeah as I said the focus has been on Manly all this week so it’s again disappointing to lose back-to-back games.”
Cherry-Evans was then pressed on reports from Sam Walker’s manager the Roosters have gone cold on signing him after his form slump.
“No, I’m not, I don’t sort of understand that stuff,” Cherry-Evans said.
“Sort of stay out of it. All I can do is control my footy at Manly and speculation will be speculation but yeah, no, just obviously we’ve just lost a couple in the row so it’d be silly for me to be worrying about stuff like that.”
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In a big blow for Manly, Haumole Olakau’atu suffered a dislocated shoulder and is facing a lengthy stint on the sidelines.
“He dislocated his shoulder there so he’ll get scans over the weekend and if there’s bone damage then potentially you have to do reconstruction,” Seibold said.
“If it’s muscle only or the ligaments only then potentially you can rehab it over six weeks but he’s going to be gone for a while.
“But just summed up the night you know he’s going for a try and dislocates his shoulder, so we will miss him of course. He is a quality player.”
Seibold admitted his side were outplayed by the last placed Titans.
“We were outplayed, defensively we missed far too many tackles, which is an attitude thing,” Seibold said.
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“We actually started really well the first 10 minutes, but after that we were well outplayed so we couldn’t get ourselves back in the contest.”
Seibold was pressed on why his team has been so inconsistent this season.
“I think mate, it comes back to attitude, being consistent individually, collectively, that’s not just the players, that’s the staff who’ve got to come up with some answers because we’re a really good footy team, right?” Seibold said.
“Like in our first month of footy, outstanding this year, even like two weeks ago, well three weeks ago, very good against the Broncos and a couple weeks earlier they were really good against the Cowboys, but it’s the story of our season. I think we missed the jump there, Titans made us pay.”
Seibold took ownership of the side’s preparation as they currently sit outside the top eight.
“We’ve done it every away trip this year, we did it up in Townsville, played really well up there,” Seibold said.
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“We did it over in Perth, it was a really competitive game. We’ve tried to do this, rather than travel on our days off, because we’ve had such a pretty heavy playing load, rather than travel on days off we’ve tried to train and then travel that evening.
“But when you get beaten there’s always going to be questions around, was that the right prep? So I take ownership on that and I thought that’s what we needed.
“We planned that way back in November, so it’s not as though we just came up with it last week.”
Cherry-Evans saved some praise for former teammate Kieran Foran, who was brilliant against his old side.
“He’s a good friend and one of the great competitors of our game,” Cherry-Evans said.
“So there was absolutely no doubt he was coming out here tonight to put it over his old side and he did exactly that tonight, he was really good wasn’t he?”
