Defence not errors the focus for Roosters

Roosters coach Trent Robinson savaged his team's soft middle defence after a disappointing 24-20 loss to Canberra on Thursday night but said the high error count wouldn't turn his side away from playing attacking football.

The Roosters produced twice as many errors as the Raiders with 14 against seven, including plenty from inside their own half.

Robinson said while the team's execution needed to be better, high completion rates weren't his end goal. Instead he was disappointed with the number of soft tries starting to be scored through the Roosters' middle third.

"You've just got to man up and make your tackles," Robinson said.

"The guys were in position enough to make them right through to the end.

"It's on all of us but we just weren't strong enough to hold that. You can talk about missed opportunities, and we did have too many errors with the ball.

"In the end if you have a scrappy game and let two tries in you're still going to have an opportunity to come away with the win. Four tries? I think we had maybe four the week before (in round nine against Melbourne), three last week (against North Queensland), four again – now you're tossing a coin.

"We've come down on the wrong side two out of three weeks. That's on us … It's just frustrating. I think we're all feeling that hurt, especially from those four tries."

Pressed on the team's handling, Robinson said while the completion rate needed to improve it would not come at the expense of attacking football.

"It's something you want to improve but it's not something that we focus on," he said.

"We don't want to stop playing footy and hold the ball – that's not who we are. We want to play footy and improve our execution. That's just the way that we do things so we don't focus overly on that but it does add pressure on the other side of the ball. We need to improve our defence."

Robinson said back-rower Angus Crichton would be almost certainly unavailable for round 11 after leaving the field early with a medial ligament strain while lock Nat Butcher could return from a ribs injury.

"[Crichton] is OK but he had to come off with it. You could see he was hobbling as soon as we taped it up there.

"I don't know how bad it is from Angus but to come off, if it's a week you'd sort of be able to get through the game, it would be sore and you might be ready for the following week but to come off it's not a great sign for a week's time."