Wests Tigers skipper Robbie Farah took full responsibility of his side's 23-10 loss to Manly on Sunday admitting he and superstar Benji Marshall were to blame for the defeat.

In a frank assessment of where the Tigers went wrong, Farah said he and halfback Marshall failed to execute the game plan of keeping the ball as far away from Manly fullback Brett Stewart as possible.

The Sea Eagles star scored a hat trick as Manly overcame a Tigers try to Beau Ryan in just the second minute to claim a four tries to two win.

Farah said it was his fault that Stewart played his way into the game by getting confidence out of his kick returns.

"We came here with a plan to try and handle him but we went away from our game plan and I think myself and Benji have got to take the blame for that," said Farah.

"Our kicking game was very poor and we gave him too much ball in quality areas of the field.

"We kicked down his throat and gave him too many opportunities and a good player takes those opportunities and makes you pay."

Farah said the kicking game, along with poor attacking options, put too much pressure on the Tigers defence even though it was their best defensive effort of the year.

"I took a lot of wrong options in attack and a few others did as well and put our defence under a lot of pressure," he said.

"Our defence was probably the best it has been all year. Our attack let us down today."

Tigers assistant coach Royce Simmons said Stewart's class made a huge difference in the result, along with the sin-binning of Todd Payten in the second half even though no points were scored while he was off the field.

"It is probably fair to say so," said Simmons when asked if Stewart's class was the difference.

"The last few weeks they've been making some breaks and just not capitalising on them or scoring a lot of tries from their high ball.

"Today when they made a break they had speed to finish them off and he took a nice high ball over our bloke ... with that comes a bit of confidence for them."

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