Captain Kurt Gidley was his own harshest critic acknowledging a number of errors in the down-to-the wire loss to the North Queensland Cowboys.
“I love playing a team sport and I love the Club, but it's one that I'm not going to forget for all the wrong reasons,” he reflected on the match.
"Team sport is so good because you get to work hard with your mates and cover for them and they certainly covered for me today.
"It's a hard one because I made multiple errors, especially being captain and being a leader, I pride myself on leading the way, but today it was the harder I tried the worse it got for me.
“It's a tough one sitting in the sheds after the game and not being able to look your teammates in the eye."
Yet the seasoned utility says he’s not about to dwell on the negatives of the match and is eager to move on to a restored effort in Round 9.
“I can move on reasonably quick, probably after a couple of days, and I always look forward to the next game to win back my teammates' respect,” he said.
“I'm not going to be kicking stones the whole next week.
“I will look at what I was doing wrong, what I can work on and try and sort that out for the following week.”
Coach Rick Stone showed faith in Newcastle’s skipper and praised him for the positive influence and contribution he makes to the team week in week out.
“You've got to take the good with the bad and generally over the course of the year you get plenty more positives with Kurt than you do negatives,” Stone said.
“He's a pretty hard marker. He rides himself pretty hard and sets himself high standards, as you'd expect from your skipper and a bloke that's played here for a couple of years.
“I think overall with the whole balance of the year, we'll get more positives than negatives.”
