Cleary paid tribute to Daly Cherry-Evans, who was superb in leading Manly to victory in his record 310th game for the Sea Eagles.

“I don’t know, I haven’t got all the answers tonight,” Cleary said.

“Congratulations to Cherry-Evans and Manly tonight, they were too good, we just didn’t play well enough.”

Cleary was not too concerned with a knee injury to Jarome Luai and revealed he took him off late more as a precaution.

“Yeah he got a knock to his knee in the first half, so just at that point, it wasn’t worth him staying on, so he’s not too bad but we’ll see,” Cleary said.

Cleary refused to use the intercept try to Koula against the run of play as an excuse despite the fact there was a clear missed knock-on from Tommy Talau.

“It was one of about five or six intercepts we threw, so it was bad play by us in the first place,” Cleary said.

“I mean, yeah, everybody in the stadium knew it was a knock-on, but that’s poor play by us in the first place.

“We threw maybe five, six intercepts, so that was just one of them.”

Panthers skipper Isaah Yeo also wasn’t making any excuses for his side’s poor display at 4 Pines Park.

“I guess the feeling was that we thought it was a knock-on, but like Ivan touched on, even just that reaction off the back of that too,” Yeo said.

“They scored a try obviously disappointing, but yeah after that there was just no control from us.

“We just didn’t hold our hands up for long periods of time. Anytime we sort of finally started to get back in the arm-wrestle a little bit, we’d make an error, we’d give away a penalty.

“That’s something that wasn’t why we lost, but we just didn’t react well to it either, which was disappointing.”