Manly prop Brent Kite believes the Sea Eagles must change their mental approach to avoid more NRL second-half fade-outs.

The Sea Eagles lost their third match of the season, against the Gold Coast on Monday night, going down 24-22 despite having led 22-12 at one stage.

Manly's other defeats, against Wests Tigers and Parramatta, also came after the Sea Eagles went into the halftime break with healthy leads.

And Kite admitted the team's application to closing out matches wasn't as good as it should be.

"We need to see it out," Kite told reporters on Wednesday.

"At one stage, we were thinking 'by how many?' and we were only up by 10.

"We relaxed a little instead of trying to consolidate the position we had."

But despite watching his team throw away another winning position, Manly coach Des Hasler said he hadn't been ranting and raving at his players over the turnaround.

"The players are upset about it, it's no point me being angry and cranky about it," he said.

"They've got to understand that it was a game ... well within our grasp that we didn't hang on to.

"Those sorts of points you don't want to lose. The competition is tight enough and hard enough as it is.

"All three games (we've lost) have been different circumstances."

Of those circumstances however, Hasler rejected any claim his team's failure to hold onto big leads has anything to do with their fitness levels.

He said his use of just seven of the 12 available interchanges against the Titans was the right call in the circumstances.

"I've had the usual 'the players aren't fit enough' which is just total guesswork," he said.

"All the players that play the game these days are too well prepared.

"Different games present different situations and we probably haven't reacted the way we probably should have.

"When you're controlling the game and the tempo of the game as well as I thought we did in the first half, there's no need to make changes if they're not necessary.

"I think you'll find any coach would go along with that."

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