Self-confidence sees Cowboys riding high

COWBOYS players get sick and tired of hearing it.

Now they hope the external noise will stop.

For more than 10 years, North Queensland stars have absorbed the barbs. They’ve heard the whispers. That the club can’t fire without Johnathan Thurston. It’s a one-man show. Stop “JT” and the Cowboys crumble.

The stats gurus have pointed out the Cowboys’ record when Thurston isn’t calling the shots, but the club’s surge into tomorrow’s decider against the Storm has changed everything.

“Surely now everyone can stop saying we’re a one-man band,” fullback Lachlan Coote said. “Look, ‘JT’ is a champion player and sure we’ve had some lean runs without him, but we’ve shown now that we can consistently win big games without him.

“It’s been a collective thing. Michael Morgan has stepped up as a playmaker and I’m pretty pleased with the way I’ve stepped up my game.

“Like several of the guys, I made a conscious decision to be more of a leader knowing that the fullback these days is such a key position in any team.

“Without ‘JT’, we all needed to step up and be prepared to handle more pressure.”

Leading into the finals, they had lost five times in six weeks without Thurston, with several of the defeats directly traced to the lack of execution he would have rectified if he was fit.

A hard-fought, last-round loss to the Broncos in Round 26 convinced Coote they were on the cusp of a revival.

They knew they had found the playmaking chemistry to fire without Thurston — they just needed one more week to prove it.

“I knew that once we got our game plan together that we could be all right in the finals,” Coote said.

“Just before the finals, we were actually playing well, but we weren’t icing games with our execution, so that gave me some confidence we could do something in the finals if we addressed that.

“We didn’t know what we could get out of the first week of the finals, but winning against the Sharks gave us hope and beating Parramatta saw our confidence skyrocket.

“It was always going to take time to get used to playing without JT and Matt Scott, but our belief was always there.”