Newcastle Knights' Robbie Rochow is confident the team will bounce back in Saturday's match against the Parramatta Eels at Hunter Stadium after a disappointing loss against the Brisbane Broncos last weekend.
"There’s no doubt in my mind we can play well, we’ve seen that this year,” he told the media on Tuesday.
“We play well at home and there’s no doubt we can finish the year strong."
Rochow said the team has recognised where things went wrong against the Broncos and is set to rectify mistakes in order to put up a tough fight against the eighth-placed Eels.
“It was a tough loss and was a hard game…we fought well but just didn’t execute,” Rochow said.
“We didn’t get to our kicks and put ourselves under too much pressure, then a whole heap of defensive errors came into the back end of the game.
"With any opposition in this competition, you can’t afford to not build pressure.
“We didn’t manage to do that by dropping the ball and not getting good kicks away.
“It snowballed on us at the end.”
Despite the absence of a number of the team's starting players, Rochow has confidence in the Knights’ depth and makes no excuses for the weekend’s performance.
“We fielded a reasonable 17 and know we didn’t have our strongest side on the field on the weekend, but we knew we were capable of doing the job and we didn’t do it,” he said.
“This week we’ll have a pretty similar side and it’s just a matter of overcoming our own obstacles and making sure we perform well."
Rochow conceded the team feel the loss of Jeremy Smith and Kade Snowden, but is ready to adapt to the challenge.
“They are a big part of this side to have Jezza and Kade starting in the middle,” he added.
“That wasn’t our problem, because we defended well through the middle, we just didn’t build pressure.
“There’s a lot of things that can go wrong, but at the end of the day, we didn’t play well."
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