Sydney Roosters coach Trent Robinson has hit out at Ricky Stuart's recruitment strategy and criticism of NRL coaches who complain about losing players to State of Origin.
The Canberra coach said during the week that fellow mentors who grumbled about losing players to representative football were talking nonsense.
While Robinson had five key players unavailable for Sunday's 24-16 loss to the Raiders, Canberra were missing only Josh Papalii.
Given the Roosters were among the teams hardest hit by Origin selection, Robinson appeared to take Stuart's comments personally.
"Ricky recruits this team and he's built this team to what he wants it to be," Robinson said.
"That's up to them to get selected or not.
"They had their chance a couple of weeks ago to play (in the City-Country Origin match) and they didn't. That's their team."
Stuart's reasoning was that representative players won grand finals, so one measure of a team's quality was the number of players selected for Origin.
"They've been building this team. He said a couple of weeks ago they got chased because of how well they played last year and they're finding it tough this year," Robinson said.
"He obviously thinks they're one of the top teams so that's their boat, we'll look after ours.
And a suggestion the Origin period evened things up for teams without representative-quality players was also dismissed bluntly by Robinson.
"That's what the salary cap's for," he said.
The Roosters got within two points of the Raiders late in the second half but the home side responded to hold off the late charge.
Robinson said the Roosters had worked hard to develop reserve-grade players into NRL quality and their ability to stand up in first grade was a positive he took from the loss.
"It's a credit to the way the boys trained," he said.
"They trained well enough and compete enough to allow some guys to come in and play."
