Sea Eagles coach Trent Barrett will be looking to build much-needed resilience in the coming weeks following his team's 36-22 drubbing at the hands of the Wests Tigers on Monday night.
While ill-discipline came in the form of eight penalties and 10 errors, Barrett said the Sea Eagles' inability to defend at crucial moments was their undoing.
In the end Manly had to defend almost 10 more sets than their opponents.
"I thought the longer the game went, the more confidence we would have got. We just didn't help ourselves throughout the game with fourth-tackle penalties – I think we had five of them," Barrett said.
"We compounded every penalty with an error. Twenty-two points should be enough to win. We know they're a good attacking side but we have some work to do in that area especially when it comes to being more resilient on our try-line."
With the game locked up at 16-all just after half-time the Sea Eagles failed to kick on from their mid-game efforts, despite Dylan Walker, Lewis Brown and Jorge Taufua helping the side to three consecutive tries.
In the end it was Kevin Naiqama and Man of the Match James Tedesco who would ruin the Sea Eagles' prospects by combining for four tries and three try assists between them.
It leaves Manly winless with the opening fortnight of the season now complete following their Round 1 28-6 capitulation against the Bulldogs.
"We were right in the game. I thought in patches we were a hell of a lot better than last week and then in other issues we let ourselves down again," Barrett said.
"Until we can get that 80 minutes of consistent footy and doing everything right, we're going to find ourselves in that position again. There were some good things there but there are certainly some things we need to address.
"We're all in it together and there's no easy fix. We just have to keep working hard."
Barrett refused to use the absence of veteran fullback Brett Stewart as an excuse either, with the former NSW and Australian custodian battling ongoing hamstring issues.
"[Stewart will] obviously make a huge difference to us with his leadership and his talk but certainly the loss wasn't through lack of personnel," Barrett said.
"We won't hide from what we did wrong. We just need to fix it."