Parramatta will be without Mitchell Moses for at least a week after the influential halfback suffered a category-one head knock late in the 26-24 Magic Round loss to Gold Coast.
Moses sustained his injury attempting to tackle 19-year-old debutant Keano Kini in the final 10 minutes of Sunday’s match and will miss next week’s game against Canberra under the NRL’s head injury policy.
“He’s fine now but he wasn’t good,” Eels coach Brad Arthur said.
“We need to get all the advice from our docs but at the end of the day, the rules are 11 days. He’ll go through the process and then they’ll make the decision what’s best for Mitchell.”
Jake Arthur is poised to return to the halves and partner Dylan Brown, who threatened to mastermind an Eels comeback on Sunday after Kieran Foran’s first try-scoring double since 2015 and Alofiana Khan-Pereira’s fifth of the year set the Titans on the path to victory.
Brown’s two try assists and 227 run metres helped the Eels exploit the Titans’ usual lapses in concentration and cut a 16-4 half-time deficit to only two points in the final minutes.
In the end, only Tanah Boyd’s superior goal-kicking separated the sides, who scored five tries apiece in the final game of the NRL’s annual football festival at Suncorp Stadium.
The Titans’ second upset victory in as many weeks puts their record-equalling capitulation against the Dolphins firmly in the rear-view mirror and moves them into the top eight after round 10.
“We had a good win last week but it was about turning up here and doing it again,” said Titans coach Justin Holbrook.
“We had a really good first half and then obviously Parra came very hard at us at the end, which you’d expect, and the boys handled it well. Thrilled with the win.”
Five-eighth Foran had been in doubt for Sunday’s game after requiring six stitches in his finger and a pain-killer in his toe to get through round nine but made his presence felt early.
Eels fullback Clint Gutherson found himself sin-binned for holding Khan-Pereira back in a try-scoring situation and only 20 seconds later, David Fifita wrestled free of three defenders and offloaded to Foran.
The try was Foran’s first in over a year but only two minutes later, the veteran had his second, dummying to beat Andrew Davey and Will Penisini in a brilliant individual effort.
Khan-Pereira twice bamboozled Gutherson to record his own double, first chipping and chasing past the fullback and then intercepting his pass to run 95 metres and score.
Eels winger Maika Sivo had the first four-pointer of the night after a Titans error in the ruck, and continued to haunt the Gold Coast defence as he moved into outright first on the try-scoring ladder with two more tries.
Brown had the Eels back within two points when he broke free and found Davey in the journeyman’s first game since re-joining Parramatta last week.
But time favoured the Titans, who closed Magic Round out on a high.
“I just asked the team, ‘How did we lose that?’, because I felt like we did more than enough to win it,” Arthur said.
“I thought our effort was really good, we did a lot of good things, more good things than bad.
“But a couple of big moments and a couple of system errors in defence hurt us.”
© AAP 2023
