Top eight teams locked as details of week one match-ups revealed<\/a><\/p>\nForan’s Emotional final runout | 00:38<\/p>\n
Flanagan was pressed on what needs to change next season for the Dragons to climb up the ladder. <\/p>\n
\u201cNo injuries, no one in the rehab would be good,\u201d Flanagan said. <\/p>\n
\u201cToo many in that space for us. That\u2019s hurt us, the injuries. The two Couchman, Ryan was injured Round 1, Dylan Egan, Hamish Stewart and then Valentine Holmes being out for half the year and Moses Suli out for a lot of time as well. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat hurt us. So injuries would be one thing that I\u2019d cross my fingers that we don\u2019t go through that. I\u2019ve never had to go through this many injuries in a year. <\/p>\n
\u201cLet\u2019s be honest, we haven\u2019t got 10 Origin players, so when I do lose my classy players, it\u2019s hard, so if we can have a bit of luck in that space, will be fitter and faster and stronger again next year. <\/p>\n
Robbo reflects on Roosters making finals | 11:27<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll make sure of that because I felt that we got to a certain level and the season came around pretty quickly and we had to maintain what we did but we\u2019ve got Vegas next year and as I said to the boys there now, pre-season starts now.\u201d <\/p>\n
Flanagan is confident he has the squad to make the finals next year. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the plan, I think with Cooky and obviously Gutho\u2019s had a great year for us and then, we\u2019ve got a few new boys coming, a couple more to add, hopefully in the off-season and the experience the young players have gained this year,\u201d Flanagan said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThose injured boys back, touch of class obviously, Val and Suli and those players consistently playing we will give it a good shake.\u201d <\/p>\n
Chooks down Bunnies to lock in top 8 | 02:28<\/p>\n
Dragons skipper Damien Cook challenged his team to turn their narrow losses into narrow wins to return to the finals in 2026. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe probably spoke about the start of the year, the one point losses, we had a few of those, three one point losses and a couple of two points, and we spoke about we needed to fix it because these are going to be the games that keep us out of the eight at the end of the year and that\u2019s what happened,\u201d Cook said. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe put ourselves under pressure to win all but one game in the last six or something and we chucked everything into the Warriors game, almost pulled off probably one of the greatest club wins, but after that it\u2019s just been tough for the last three weeks. <\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like we threw a lot into that and a lot of the young boys will get a lot of experience out of the last three weeks.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shane Flanagan conceded the Dragons are lacking class in pressure moments and were unable to overcome a torrid…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":123736,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[47898,64,63,689,86988,4420,86992,86994,54493,86989,86848,4431,86570,4484,86987,86571,4746,7866,7677,677,4598,86993,15139,86577,4583,85,4563,86990,4737,4412,86991,9012,19121],"class_list":["post-123735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-answer-critics","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australia-and-new-zealand","tag-club-wins","tag-damien-cook","tag-defensive-errors","tag-dragons-skipper","tag-dylan-egan","tag-final-entrance","tag-finals-fixtures","tag-hamish-stewart","tag-key-issue","tag-kieran-foran","tag-lack-class","tag-man-clean-out","tag-mark-st-john","tag-minute-mark","tag-moses-suli","tag-oceania","tag-penrith-panthers","tag-point-losses","tag-ryan","tag-season-fade-out","tag-shane-flanagan","tag-sports","tag-st-george-illawarra-dragons","tag-torrid-injury","tag-trent-robinson","tag-valentine-holmes","tag-wayne","tag-young-boys","tag-young-players"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}