Flanagan was as angry as any coach in a post-match press conference this season on Saturday night, taking particular aim at two calls from the final minutes of the 20-18 defeat in Homebush.<\/p>\n
“I was really proud of the effort they put in and the way they played, but the game was taken away from us from I believe wrong decisions,” the Dragons coach said.<\/p>\n
Flanagan was incensed that the Bulldogs used their captain’s challenge to earn a penalty with five minutes left after the bunker ruled Luciano Leilua had interfered in the ruck as Jacob Kiraz played the ball.<\/p>\n
The coach accused Kiraz of ball-planting, an illegal move when a player puts the ball on the ground and attempts to play it without regaining their footing.<\/p>\n
“The Luciano Leilua decision was outrageous,” Flanagan said.<\/p>\n
“He’s got to get to his feet before he plants the ball.<\/p>\n
“You can’t be falling sideways. You can’t ball-plant … but tonight we ball-planted and we lost the game because of it.”<\/p>\n
As the Bulldogs attacked the line on the back of their penalty, Flanagan thought Viliame Kikau batted the ball into Tyrell Sloan as he attempted a quick pass on the left edge.<\/p>\n
But the possible knock-on was missed and the Bulldogs continued to attack the line, with Lachlan Galvin throwing the match-winning pass for Jethro Rinakama to score moments later.<\/p>\n
“Kikau passes the ball, hit Sloan and goes forward, so in the collision that’s a knock-on. Ever since 100 years, that’s a knock-on and that was at the 78-minute mark,” he said.<\/p>\n
The Saints are set to finish the weekend three wins behind eighth spot, their NRL finals hopes now relying on mathematical possibilities.<\/p>\n
To finish the season with a winning record, they must claim victory in all of their last seven games – and they face Penrith, Canberra, Cronulla and the Warriors in that stretch.<\/p>\n
“They’re trying so hard,” Flanagan said.<\/p>\n
“They’re a good side the Bulldogs, they compete hard, but it was some decisions tonight that cost us two competition points and could cost us an opportunity to play semi-finals.”<\/p>\n
Flanagan confirmed he would seek clarity from the NRL about the decisions.<\/p>\n
“I’ll go through those channels, but in the end we don’t get these two competition points,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Flanagan was as angry as any coach in a post-match press conference this season on Saturday night, taking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7079,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[568],"tags":[64,63,761,762,158,85],"class_list":["post-7078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nrl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-national-rugby-league","tag-nationalrugbyleague","tag-nrl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7078","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=7078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}