“Not very good": Gardiner criticises error laden round

Ben Gardiner has criticised players for an abnormal number of errors being made during Round 18.

With only five games this week as a result of the Origin bye, many teams were without their stars, seeing them rely upon their depth.

With more inexperienced players in line-ups, this saw 138 errors being made across the week's action, with eight out of the ten teams exceeding their error average.

Reflecting on the week's performances, the Perth Bears assistant coach was not impressed by the abundance of these mistakes.

“Not very good at all,” Gardiner said on SEN’s Front Office with Chad Townsend.  

“The least errors on the weekend was 24 errors in the Panthers Souths game that started the weekend.

“Then as you go through, we had two games that had 31 errors. We had two games that had 28 and 29 errors.

“That means that on average, you're having 15 errors per team. You can't win big games like that.

“If you look at the time that I spent at the Panthers, we expect that we'd need to have eight errors or less to be winning games.

“If you're having any more than that, you're sort of giving the opportunity too many chances for possession and too many opportunities with territory.”

The Samoa coach then focused on two specific games from the weekend, demonstrating the increase of errors.

“When I looked at the Dragons game, the Dragons had 17 errors (and) the Tigers had 14 errors. That's just too many,” he continued.

“And the thing that got me about that game, there was just errors in really simple positions, errors in the ruck, errors in the play of the ball.

“You go into the Eels Sea Eagles game, it was really similar, just too many opportunities where they were giving the ball to the other team in good positions, which put them in the positions to be able to score tries too easily.

“We've got all of these errors, and we're giving the opposition all of these opportunities to score, but then we're not scoring any points.”

“So why is that the case?

“You sort of then look at the quality of the team and the spines that are in play and you sort of go, they've got all of these opportunities to score, but they're still not able to find points.

“That's an indication that the quality's not as high as what it has been in other weeks when the Origin players are in there.”

Round 19 gets underway on Friday night when the Tigers host the Warriors in Campbelltown.

Kick-off takes place 8pm AEST.