Not for the first time this year, Rabbitohs coach Michael Maguire has blamed poor handling for a loss after South Sydney went down to the Brisbane Broncos 30-10 at ANZ Stadium on Saturday night.
The Rabbitohs finished the game with 18 errors and a miserable completion rate of just 63 per cent to give themselves little chance of toppling last year's beaten grand finalists.
Simple dropped ball, forward passes and forced offloads plagued the Rabbitohs' night, with errors directly leading to two of Brisbane's tries.
"We're just not giving ourselves an opportunity at the moment," Maguire said after the game.
"With the games we're playing, I don't think we've won a completion rate for quite a couple of months now, and it's something that we're continually working at and we need to make sure that we improve on that, because if we do, we're going to give ourselves a much better opportunity than what we showed tonight.
"The dropped balls just create pressure and there were a couple of tries that we should have stopped as well.
"I'm a bit disappointed with the tries that were scored. We should be stopping those and we've shown that we can stop those, but we just weren't good enough tonight."
With six losses on the trot, the Rabbitohs are staring down the barrel of their first bottom-eight finish since Maguire took over in 2012.
But while the outside focus is on their September aspirations, Maguire said getting the basics right was a bigger concern than featuring in this year's finals series.
"At the end of the day we need to make sure we get our fundamentals right, because if you do that, then you'll put yourself in that opportunity," he said.
"We've obviously made things hard at this point of time around where we sit, but as a team we need to make sure we get the basics of the game right. If we get the basics of the game right, we'll grow.
"I need to make sure around our training that we are diligent with the things we're doing.
"I can't falter the effort of these players. The effort and the passion that they have for this club is definitely there, it's just a matter of making sure that we focus on the little errors of the game.
"At the moment we're probably applying more pressure on ourselves than what we need to."
