North Queensland Coach Paul Green labelled the handling of the severe ankle injury suffered by winger Nene Macdonald an "absolute debacle" and a "disgrace".
An irate Green said the way in which match officials handled the suspected fractured and dislocated ankle suffered by Macdonald soured the night.
"That was an absolute debacle," Green said.
"It was explained to our captain on-field that the process is a trainer has to go to the touchy. We had a touchy, our blue shirt was standing next to the touch judge asking them to stop the game."
“We had our doctor on the field, our yellow shirt went to the pocket ref and he got sent away. That was an absolute debacle, it was a disgrace."
"We got a guy there with a fractured dislocation of his ankle clearly distressed ... and we get sent away.
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"They play on. They stop the game twice for a [Melbourne] blood nose for God's sake."
Green was happy with the way his team played despite the 18-12 loss and said it was a much better performance than previous weeks.
"I was proud of the way we played tonight. I think we showed it in patches but never really consistently, in particular when we'd been under pressure in games up to this point."
"We had a good win here against the Dragons but in the other games when the pressure was applied to us we probably didn't show that.
"They [players] had plenty of energy about what they wanted to do and pretty committed for each other which is what you want to see as a coach even though we didn't get the reward we were after tonight."
"I know we're getting tested in a lot of different ways at the moment and that happens in a season sometimes but invariably every team goes through it at some period and that's where your character is revealed as a group."
Green said he had not seen a replay of the incident involving lock Josh McGuire and Storm five-eighth Cameron Munster in which Munster was initially angered over the nature in which McGuire's hand contacted his face.
