Cronulla star James Maloney says their round 26 loss to grand final opponents wasn’t such a bad thing.

The Sharks were beaten 26-6 at AAMI Park but Maloney and his teammates weren’t sweating the score.

“While the scoreline looked pretty convincing I thought we played good footy, we created opportunities, we just didn’t finish them. That hurt us,” he said.

“We probably leaked some points that we probably shouldn’t have but in general the performance was right where we wanted to be to springboard us into the semis.”