Kiwis skipper Benji Marshall believes New Zealand can defend their title at the upcoming Four Nations tournament despite Sunday afternoon's 42-6 thrashing at the hands of Australia in Newcastle.
The Kiwis were never really in the contest as Australia shot out of the blocks scoring a point a minute for a 20-0 lead after 20 minutes to virtually end the contest a quarter of the way through the game.
New Zealand came back at the Aussies early in the second half but the Kangaroos ran in three more tries to inflict a morale –sapping eight-tries-to-one loss on the Kiwis.
While Marshall agreed it was a disappointing effort from his side, he said they could overcome this loss and still do well at the Four Nations tournament in the UK starting later this month.
"I think we can turn it around," he said. "We have got a four-day turnaround now before we fly out and we really have to get our act together and improve on today."
"We have got a pretty proud team and a pretty proud bunch of guys who are willing to work hard for one another. Today, the effort was there but the execution was poor. It was like quicksand; the harder we tried the worse it got."
Marshall said the loss wouldn't dent the pride of his side but instead act like a spur for them to improve their game ahead of the UK tour.
"It is a wake-up call. And it is just not good enough," he said. "As an international team we recognise that and we want to improve."
"We showed little glimpses of things we can do when we rolled through the middle but there wasn't enough of those."
"We have some pretty disappointed boys in the sheds."
"We expect better from ourselves – it is international rugby league representing our country and quite frankly well all agree that this wasn't good enough today."
"It was a big learning curve for us. We only completed half of our plays in the first half and you can't give any team a 26 point head-start, so we have a lot of work to do."
Kiwis coach Stephen Kearney was equally disappointed with the result and refused to blame the loss on his side's inexperience and the fact that they had six players making their international debut in the game.
"They (Australia) were hot today but we allowed them to look that good with the amount of ball we turned over and slipping off tackles and poor decisions. And it wasn't just the guys on debut it was the whole team," Kearney said.
"We just didn't hang on to the footy well enough. We didn't do that very well in both halves but certainly that first 15 to 20 minutes. To get yourself in the game against Australia you have to do that and we didn't do it well enough."