Interim Eels coach Trent Barrett has admitted his star playmaker – NSW halfback Mitchell Moses – is “frustrated” at the struggling club.
Parramatta lost a fourth straight game on Thursday night, this time to South Sydney, which sunk them back down to last on the ladder.
It was reported this week that Moses sprayed his teammates in the sheds last weekend after a loss against Newcastle and his frustrations boiled over again on Thursday.
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Moses was sin-binned in the dying minutes for a professional foul and the Rabbitohs then ran away with it to win 32-16.
“He’s frustrated at the moment,” Barrett said.
“He’s frustrated with the performance tonight. The game was done and dusted by that stage but it boiled over for him at the end.”
Parramatta conceded three soft tries that ultimately proved the difference and Barrett echoed Moses’ frustrations.
“The three (soft) tries they scored is probably the most disappointing thing, we stopped moving under the ball and that’s a choice,” he said.
“We had a couple (players) stop and we didn’t keep moving. I thought the highlight was (debutants) Charlie Guymer and Jake Tago and how they went and that’s probably a lesson for all of us, the effort, it meant a lot to those two.”
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Barrett was asked about a try his side conceded on the stroke of halftime in which Cody Walker collected an offload to score almost untouched next to the posts.
“We stopped and there was nine seconds to go and you just can’t do that. That was disappointing, we needed to be more desperate there,” he said.
“The little ones at the end are hurting us too, you look at 26-16 and it’s respectable then you let in another ordinary try to blow it out to 30 and people look at that and think they’ve been walloped again but it’s not the case.
“But we’ve got to get that out of our game because it’s probably been a habit of ours all year.
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“We were too sideways in the rain, you’ve got to play back through teams, you’re not going to score pretty tries in the wet and we didn’t handle the conditions tonight.
“The tries you score playing through teams, they’re still worth four points, they don’t all have to be beautiful.”
Eels skipper Clint Gutherson added: “There were at least three tries where we just stopped and hoped someone else would do their job and it doesn’t matter what grade you’re playing, you do that and they’re going to score and that’s the most disappointing thing at the moment.”
Junior Paulo went off in the second half with an ankle injury that Barrett said “doesn’t look great” and the prop will have scans on Friday.
