Dragons suffer seventh straight loss

ST GEORGE Illawarra have slumped to the longest losing streak in the joint-venture's history suffering their seventh straight loss at the hands of Melbourne in Napier, New Zealand on Saturday.

The 22-4 defeat leaves the Dragons 8-10 for the season and facing an uphill battle to salvage their fading finals hopes, a scenario that was unthinkable given their run of nine straight weeks in the top four over the opening half of the season. 

The match swung on a crucial call midway through the first half after the Dragons looked to have opened the scoring through Jason Nightingale only for referee Matt Cecchin to rule the pass from Benji Marshall had traveled forward. 

It proved the turning point of the match with Melbourne marching up the field and scoring barely a minute later through young-gun Nelson Asofa-Solomona to take a 6-0 lead. Fijian flyer Marika Koroibete darted 80 metres from an intercept moments before the break to extend the lead to 12-0 and leave the Dragons at long odds to run down the noted front-runners in the second half. It was a play that typified the Dragons luckless run over the past eight weeks.

"It looked alright to me," McGregor said of the call post-match

"Can't do much about it but we seem to be on the wrong end of it at the moment."

The call aside, McGregor conceded his side was badly out of sorts with the football

"I thought Melbourne gave us a good lesson in how to build pressure. They put it in the in-goal five to our one. I thought our d was really solid. They scored a couple of tries off kicks and an intercept. The only real genuine try they scored was hitting a lead [runner] there on our try-line. But flip it over, we're not building any pressure with the ball far too many passes hit the deck.

"We've got real good intent behind our defence and its holding up but our attacks's not at the moment so we've go to fix it. We managed to do both at the start of the year but we're just not capable of doing that at the moment. There's got to be better purpose behind every play instead of just running the ball because you need to."

The loss leaves them in ninth position, but they could slip in 10th spot if Canberra can beat Penrith on Sunday, ahead of their must-win match with lowly ranked Newcastle at Kogarah next Sunday. They then face a tough two weeks on the road against the Warriors and league leaders Brisbane and will likely need to win at least one of those matches to stay in the finals hunt.

"There's pressure to win every game and next week will be no different but every one you lose, you're one closer to not making the semi-finals," McGregor said.

"We go home and play Newcastle at Kogarah so we need to really work hard to get a result because it's at the critical stage, we need to win games of footy."

The Dragons horror run with injury looked to have claimed it's biggest casualty when Josh Dugan stayed down after twisting his ankle awkwardly in a 19th minute tackle from Tohu Harris. He got to his feet and finished the match unhindered but it wasn't enough to spark his side's pedestrian and at times sloppy attack. Dugan also leveled a biting allegation at Storm prop Jesse Bromwich in what was an eventful but unhappy night for the Blues No. 1

The Dragons absorbed a mountain of pressure at their own end early in the match which made Asofa-Solomona's 26th minute barge-over effort a disappointing lapse. Koroibete's long range effort minutes before the break saw the Stormtake a 12-0 lead into the sheds.

Kevin Proctor's 54th minute try from close range put the game out of reach for the Dragons at 18-0 before Mahe Fonua's 60th minute four-pointer put the game to bed.

Peter Mata'utia finally broke the Dragons duck in the 78th minute but it was far too late to have a bearing on the result.