Wests Tigers accept they have ongoing problems which need to be addressed if they are to be any hope of challenging for the NRL premiership this year.

Unfortunately, they won't get much of a chance to fix things up in the short-term, with competition pacesetters St George Illawarra ready to take advantage on Sunday if the Tigers dish up another sub-par performance.

The Tigers were humbled by South Sydney a fortnight ago, going into halftime down 27-0 en route to a 29-18 loss, and coach Tim Sheens was so unimpressed with their next effort against Penrith that he didn't let the team sing their victory song despite escaping with a 20-18 win.

After that match Sheens said a similarly haphazard game from the Tigers would result in a humiliating scoreline against the Dragons - and he didn't back down on that claim on Thursday.

"We've spoken as a club and aired what happened last week and we need to be better than that to really be any sort of force this year," Sheens said.

"It's not a matter of this week, it's about where we're going this year to be quite honest.

"We just played so poorly (against Penrith) and kept shooting ourselves in the foot that a side like St George Illawarra just feed off that, as do the better sides, so we've got to be a lot better than that this week.

"They're issues that we've got to continually work on, there's no doubt about that, but I'm just not happy with our team not turning up at times in respect to their preparation and so on.

"We've talked about `you can be beaten by talent' but we don't want to be out prepared."

Captain Robbie Farah was confident the Tigers could turn things around in time to save their year, but conceded they were a long way short of the team that almost toppled the Dragons in a thrilling preliminary final last season.

"No doubt (we can find last year's form), we're not playing our best but we know it's there, we're not too far off but we've just got to tweak a few little things," he said.

"I've got every confidence in the side still. We spoke at the start of the year about doing something in this competition and my belief hasn't changed.

"It's such a long year and such a tough competition, it's not going to be all rosy throughout the year.

"We're going through a tough time but I guess we'll find out what we're made of this Sunday.

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