Straight-shooting Cronulla lock Cameron McInnes candidly admits the Sharks need to man up if they're to match it with the NRL heavyweights.
Much has been made of Cronulla's galling one-from-seven record against top-eight opposition this year and McInnes concedes the Sharks too easily throw up the white flag.
Cronulla opened the scoring and dominated the first quarter of the game against the Warriors on Sunday before conceding four tries in 12 minutes to trail 22-6 at halftime.
The second half was a carbon copy as the hosts piled on 22 more points to Cronulla's six in a 44-12 shellacking in Auckland.
McInnes says that's not good enough and is challenging teammates to show more resolve when the going gets tough.
"Moments in games where things don't go our way we're not responding quick enough and that wouldn't matter where the team's situated on the table," he said on Wednesday.
"It's more about us not being able to back up our adversity. That's the biggest thing - just hold our gloves up in those situations.
"Just going off the weekend, there were periods in the game that went well and then their scores came in waves in little 10-minute periods where we weren't resilient enough."
No team in history has won the competition after leaking 50 points in a match, but that's the challenge confronting the Sharks after Craig Fitzgibbon's side were crushed 54-10 by Melbourne last month.
"We know what the problems are - it's black and white, it's clear," McInnes said.
"Just make your tackles, score more points than them and stop them scoring tries. To a man, we're not doing our job well enough."
With Cronulla having scored more points than any team in the premiership this season, McInnes knows they can attack as well as any team.
But he said the onus was every player to raise their game and conceded it was cruel on centre Siosifa Talakai and five-eighth Matt Moylan that the former representative stars were made the scapegoats and dropped by Fitzgibbon.
"We need to respond and decisions need to be made and decisions are never easy because it's a team game," he said ahead of Sunday's hosting of Manly at PointsBet Stadium.
"It's never one individual but we need to respond, we need to do something different with our defence to make sure we're doing the right thing.
"It's not easy, it's not nice, but it's all of us."
