Reece Walsh slams Warriors in raw interview

Warriors fullback Reece Walsh has called on his teammates to take a good long look in the mirror after they slumped to their seventh loss in eight weeks with a 44-12 thrashing by Manly.

The Warriors put in a horror show in the first half to be down 26-0 at one stage. They never recovered and Walsh couldn't hide his disappointment post-match.

"It's tough. We just go out there and we sabotage ourselves," Walsh said.

"There's no other way to put it. We put ourselves under pressure and we keep doing it every week.

"It's not good enough. We keep shooting ourselves in the foot. There's just patches where we just don't get it right. We just make it so easy for the other team. It's really frustrating."

Walsh challenged his teammates to ask themselves some brutally tough questions in a bid to turn around their season, which is on life support at the midpoint of the year.

"We've just got to go home, look ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves, 'Do we want to be here?'" Walsh said.

"Do we want to be trying for our mates? The things we're tossing up, we're just not working for our mates beside us. It's first grade, and it's not good enough. We've got to get tighter as a group - and start working harder for each other."

Television pundit and former NRL player Braith Anasta commended Walsh for asking some honest questions of his side as they slumped to nine losses and four wins at the halfway mark of the competition.

"Obviously hard to interview the young fella after that. I mean, what can you say? He knows how disappointing they were," Anasta said.

"It hurts him, and it's hard to even ask him where it did go wrong, because I don't even think he'd have the answers himself"

Kiwis legend Benji Marshall sympathised with Walsh having to sum up the plight of his team after such a tough loss and praised him for his honest assessment.

"You could obviously see how disappointed he was, and how much it was hurting him," Marshall said.

"I've been in that situation. To answer those questions when you're emotional about losing, it's really hard. So, to hear him talk about some of the things [going on] in his side, sometimes things just come out that you don't expect.

"It would be a tough night for the whole side, but good on him for fronting up and owning up to the performance."

This article was first published on nzherald.co.nz and is republished here with permission