Canberra skipper Alan Tongue says his team must lift their performances over the next few weeks or find themselves out of NRL finals contention.

The Raiders have just four wins from 12 games so far this season and were disappointingly beaten by Cronulla last time out when a Paul Gallen try snatched a two-point win for the Sharks.

Canberra travel to Brookvale Oval this Sunday to take on in-form Manly before three matches against teams currently in the top eight - Melbourne, Gold Coast and Newcastle.

Tongue says his team has targeted this period as crucial to their hopes of keeping their season alive.

"We've tried to break it down a little bit, we looked at our matches in between the byes and we really wanted to focus on getting three wins there," he told AAP.

"We got two out of three, we lost against the Storm down there, but after the bye we were just really disappointed about the game on the weekend.

"It was one that we needed to put a lot of energy into after the bye and everyone fresh.

"They were coming off a couple of good wins and really starting to build some momentum but it was a game that we felt got away from us and we were really disappointed there.

"It's important these next four weeks that we do make the most of it ... because you don't want to get to this stage of the season and it's already getting to that stage now, where you start looking at how many games you've got left and how many wins you need to get into the finals."

After finishing sixth last year, the Raiders have failed to find consistent form this season, but showed signs of a turnaround with big wins over the Warriors and South Sydney before last week's heartbreaking loss to the Sharks.

Tongue said the team had no-one to blame but themselves for some of their eight defeats.

"We can't change what's happened but more importantly we need to learn from why we've been in three or four games that we should have won," he said.

"Parramatta is definitely one, the Wests Tigers right at the start of the season, we had that game pretty much won, and the Sharks as well.

"We could eventually have been a lot further ahead than we are and it's important that we look and we learn from that.

"We went back to some of our old habits against the Sharks. We were in front 20-10 with 25 to 30 to go and we just needed to get dirty and play some pretty basic footy ... but just errors and poor options, those things let us down."

Brought to you by AAP © 2024 AAP