League: Hoffman bursting to help Warriors regain much-needed confidence

Ryan Hoffman. Photo / Getty Images

Back-rower Ryan Hoffman struggled watching Warriors teammates slump to four consecutive defeats and is looking to help them regain some consistency when he makes his return from a calf injury in tonight's match in Sydney's west against Penrith.

Hoffman suffered the injury early in the final State of Origin clash in Brisbane on July 8 and his frustrations grew as the Warriors fortunes worsened.

Back in the second-row for the match at Pepper Stadium in Penrith, the 259 NRL game veteran will add some much-needed experience to a side struggling for confidence.

"It started off frustrating with it happening in the Origin and then missing some games with the boys," said Hoffman. "Frustrating in that I wanted to work harder with my injury, but unfortunately with a calf injury it's not something that you can work harder on to get back out there.

"It's [about] working smarter and that's been the most frustrating part.

"You could see some good effort being put in there but they just weren't getting the results," he said.

"You can see some great effort by some players and you want to get out there and back those efforts up. I'm pretty keen to get back out there and hopefully we can lift those near games into wins."

Hoffman believes his side have shown glimpses of the standards required but says they've let themselves down by dropping their intensity and not performing consistently for the full 80 minutes.

The 31-year-old expects he will be better for the initial hit-out after spending the past five weeks on the sidelines.

"It's an opportunity to tick a few more boxes this week and I should be right," he said.

"We've been good in patches and when you're playing in the NRL you can't be good in patches, you've got to be good for 80 minutes.

"It comes down to our start and I didn't think on the weekend that we started very well, against St George, and they started to get the ascendancy. It's going to be no different playing Penrith at Penrith, they're a very tough team there, so we've got to make sure we start well and don't just play well in those patches every now and then. We've got to be good throughout the whole 80 minutes."

The 10th-placed Warriors can't be preoccupied with their tenuous finals hopes, he says, and need to concentrate only on getting the simple things right against the 14th-placed Panthers, who will be determined to end a five-match losing streak.

"We're not going in thinking about the eight because that might have been the issue over the past couple of weeks.

"We might have been thinking about what opportunities are there and may have tensed up a bit and froze in the way we played.

"It's all about performance," he said.

"It's all about individuals focusing on their performance and making sure that they're doing what they bring to the team as well as they possibly can."