Rebels coach Dave Wessels has pointed to his side's "lazy" lack of discipline as a cancer which must be cut from the Melbourne system if they are to succeed in the wake of their loss to the Stormers.
Ill-discipline and set piece starved the Rebels of clean ball and subsequently cost them any chance they had of breaking their South African duck.
Wessels was concise in his take on the loss post match, having watched his side's scrum capitulate for the first 50 minutes.
"There are two areas of our game that really let us down," Wessels said.
"And it's not skill errors, discipline wise, it's just lazy stuff.
"Not getting back onside - I think we gave away seven or eight penalties in the first half - statistically if you give more than 10 penalties you're going to struggle win Super Rugby games and we (nearly) did that in the first half.
"And then the second one was just our set piece - we won about 50 percent of our scrums and 60 percent of our lineouts.
"If you don't do those two things you're not going to win Super Rugby.
"I thought we did a lot of good things but unfortunately, those two things just made it very hard."
Wessels said both starting props suffered knocks in the first term which limited their capacity to scrummage but looked internally when searching for the source of the side's ill-discipline.
"I'm probably not being tough enough on the discipline in training and that's showing itself in the game," he said.
"Someone once said to me if a player is making a certain error and you're still talking about that error in three months time, that's on you.
"That's not the player's fault, that's the coach's fault - that's my job.
"I think that's how I'm feeling about our discipline thing.
"I've tried a couple different ways of selling the message to the team but it hasn't resonated.
"That's my job, I've let the team down and I need to think about how we do that better.
"And we will - I'll find a way."
"We're disappointed with this performance here because I felt that had we had more ball and had we not given them 60 metres easy up the field, we would have been much more competitive in the game.
"When we had the ball, we caused them some problems.
"But we have a lot to learn, to be honest, if we are going to be a playoff team that's competitive."
