Eels 44 Tigers 6

PARRAMATTA vowed they would not get fooled again.

When all the talk before the game against Wests Tigers was of how their opponents had lost players left, right and centre to injury, the Eels got together and said: "Remember what happened against the Roosters". As yesterday's 38-point win suggested, they remembered only too well.

The match with the Roosters was in the round before State of Origin I.

The Roosters had four star forwards - Craig Fitzgibbon, Willie Mason, Anthony Tupou and Nate Myles - out because of representative duty. The Eels had won two in a row, they were playing at home and the only player they were missing to Origin was centre Jarryd Hayne. The Roosters won 32-12. And that hurt.

"The Roosters belted us," Parramatta fullback Luke Burt said as he celebrated not only the win, but his own haul of 16 points from a try and six goals from eight attempts.

"What happened that night got mentioned. Everyone said 'we won't be letting that happen again'."

The Tigers were well aware it was going to be a difficult game for them to win, given that they are a relatively small team to start with and props Ryan O'Hara, Todd Payten and Bryce Gibbs were injured.

Back-rower Liam Fulton was also out. Then, late in the week, selected prop Keith Galloway and winger Taniela Tuiaki were also forced to withdraw because of injury.

That is not to say Tigers coach Tim Sheens didn't think there was still a way.

But it might help to play up the injury angle in the media and maybe lull the Eels into a false sense of security. Only problem was the Roosters result meant Parramatta had already been down that road.

Eels second-rower Nathan Hindmarsh, who scored two of his team's eight tries, told how coach Michael Hagan had covered the injury issue in his final address before the players took the field.

"Hages said before we ran out 'we don't want to worry about who is in or out for them'," Hindmarsh said.

"They were minus a few players, but we couldn't let that affect our thinking.

"We stuck to the game plan and didn't get over-excited when we kept scoring points."

The Eels scored the first 22 points and the last 22. The Tigers scored the middle six.

Parramatta are not the biggest side in the competition either, but they are certainly big enough when they are on their game. Yesterday, they powered through their work and made the Tigers pay for not being big enough.

Playing behind a rampant forward pack, Eels halfback Brett Finch and five-eighth Feleti Mateo combined to do an excellent playmaking job.

Finch was quick with his decision-making and even quicker with his hands. Mateo either put a step on defenders, forcing them into grabbing tackles that didn't cover up the ball and allowed him to get it away, or just ran straight and hard and ploughed halfway through tackles before getting it away anyway.

If the Tigers were going to be any chance, they had to keep their error rate to an absolute minimum. They didn't get anywhere near doing that.

The best example was near the end of the first half. Finch was ruled to have played at a kick that hit him on the knee and the Tigers got a scrum feed 18m out from the Parramatta line. The Tigers turned the ball over on the first tackle and then conceded a penalty. The Eels got down the other end of the field and replacement hooker Matt Keating scored, with the conversion making it 22-0.

"It was always going to be difficult for us against any team today, let alone a strong side," Sheens said.

"But we allowed them to dominate us by compounding the problem with a lot of dropped ball and discipline errors, particularly in the first half. We're not going to use that [so many forwards being out injured] as an excuse.

"Other teams have injuries, or players backing up from Origin. But by not completing our sets and not working hard enough, we made sure size did matter."