Sydney Roosters Head Coach Trent Robinson says the team are hungry to build on their current form when they face the Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks in another must-win match at PointsBet Stadium on Saturday night.
Entering the elimination final on a five-game win-streak, Robinson recognises internal belief and courage within the squad as one of the driving factors that has rocketed the Roosters into seventh position on the competition ladder after sitting in 14th only six weeks ago.
Robinson: 'We're Clear On Our Style'
The three-time Premiership-winning Coach has delivered clear instructions to his squad ahead of the showdown and is confident that every player who dons a Red, White and Blue jersey will rise to the occasion.
“We've worked our way into a position where all the teams are trying to hold onto their game, we’re trying to continue to develop our game,” he said.
“We've done that over the last six weeks with slight shifts in personnel and players coming back in, so we continue to work on our game.
“[We’ve got] belief in how we're trying to play the game both in attack, but also in defence as well.
“We're pretty clear now on our style and now it's just about really nailing it tomorrow night.”
Robinson says that every year of finals footy poses new challenges, which is why the Roosters must continue to focus on their game.
“Every year I’ve been in the finals is slightly different, if you try and bottle it and say we’ll go back to how this works, you hold on to the past too much,” he said.
“This is different again, this is a brand-new experience but as I said, our belief in how we have developed our game is really clear and also our mindset towards going after tomorrow night.
“The belief, the freedom, the hunger to go after the game is really simple and clear for us.
“I've spoken about it week-in week-out around our focus on playing our style of footy understanding the opposition and the game plan that we've got to have.
“Attacking the game with a really strong defensive mindset and swing freely with the ball so that isn't going to change … we have to be steely about our mindset and how were approaching it.”
The Tricolours mentor explains that the team have enjoyed living day-to-day using internal motivation, rather than external criticism, as a driving factor when it comes to improvement.
“Someone asked me whether we used it as external motivation and you can, but then when people start patting you on the back again, that's when you can start to feel good if you've used the negative as motivation,” he said.
“I'm sure it's got in, but it hasn't been a part of our dialogue at all inside the walls, you know I've mentioned it in press conferences about the post-mortems being done way too early and people have tried to talk about our season, and I've been trying to talk about next week [and] staying focused on that.
“We haven't had to change tact at all, like this has been another week, we know we've made the finals but it's another do or die game, so let's go, let's be really focused, let's keep going.
“We are living week to week and it's a great way to live, it's a good lesson in life about how you can do all the planning and pat yourselves on the back for how you're going in life, but just living day today is also a nice way to live and we've embraced it and we need to keep reaping the rewards from it.”
