A harsh late penalty against Jaxson Paulo during the Sea Eagles’ thrilling 13-12 Magic Round loss to the Broncos infuriated Manly coach Anthony Seibold. With four minutes remaining, Jock Madden of the Broncos scored the game-winning field goal thanks to a high tackle on Deine Mariner by Paulo, who had dived on him on the ground.
Seibold took issue with a couple of decisions in the game, including Paulo’s last ditch penalty.
“Well we haven’t lost a game this year by more than two scores, so we fought really hard and we have played some really good footy,” Seibold said.
“I thought tonight they scored a try when we had a player in the sin bin.
“I’m not sure when the last time a player was sin-binned for being off-side at marker 40 meters out from the try line.
“When you compare or contrast it with the fact that we go from dummy half down the other end of the field and it becomes a six again when they’re off-side from marker, it was a pretty tough choice on our behalf. It’s not completely clear to me. That is a little confusing to me because it wasn’t a try-scoring scenario. And to be honest, I felt that the most recent penalty was among the softest ever.
“So it’s tackle five the guy was on the floor, potentially a knock-on, I think it was Jackson Paulo who dived on him.
“I mean he stays down as he just looked around there and he wasn’t so it was tough.
“But ultimately they were too good and they were able to take their chance.”
Manly skipper Daly Cherry-Evans only realised it was a tough call when he saw the Paluo penalty on the big screen.
“At the time definitely have to back the live decision but it wasn’t until we saw it on the big screen that we thought we might have been hard done by,” Cherry-Evans said.
“But that’s footy. You get them some weeks, some weeks you don’t get them and they were good enough to ice it at the end.”
Even though his team lost, Seibold was nonetheless proud of them for rallying from a 12-0 deficit to almost steal the win in the closing seconds. Seibold remarked, “I was really proud of the guys.” “They seemed incredibly hard to me. I believe that the way we played our game had a really hard edge. Tolu Koula was undoubtedly a prime example. Despite suffering a severe blow to his AC joint, he continued to play and put up a fierce fight. Thus, he most likely summarised the performance. I felt incredibly proud. In the end, we were not successful. Our goal in coming here is to win. I was upset since we had assumed we would win, but I was also quite proud of the team.
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