COWS WANT HAPPY END TO TIGER TALE
AS Johnathan Thurston once again prepares to enter a black, white and gold house of pain, his North Queensland teammates have admitted the pressures of delivering him a champion’s farewell weighs heavily on their minds.
The Cowboys will attempt to continue their belated revival against Wests Tigers at Leichhardt Oval tonight by ending one of the longest-running hoodoos in the NRL.
For all his glorious moments and all the great Cowboys teams he’s led over the years, Thurston has never beaten the Tigers on NSW soil.
Thurston is 0-12 against the Tigers in Sydney, dating all the way back to his Canterbury days.
Be it the 2005 grand final, a match Thurston said would haunt him for the rest of his life, to grimy upsets in front of 6000 people on wet, forgotten Saturday nights out at Campbelltown, it doesn’t matter.
It’s an intriguing subplot for a match that has taken on big implications for the Cowboys for one simple reason – they started the season so poorly they can’t afford to slip further behind the pack.
With Thurston’s retirement looming, in-form centre Ben Hampton admitted the prospect of letting the 35-year old down hangs over the playing group like a spectre.
“It’s a hard one to explain but yeah, you do feel like everything he’s done for the Cows, for the sport and the NRL, it does kind of feel like you’re letting him down a little bit,” Hampton said.
Coach Paul Green earlier this week said the Cowboys needed to embrace the emotional side of Thurston’s last ride and Michael Morgan conceded it had been the elephant in the room for much of the year.
“Being his last season I’d like nothing more than to send him out like the champion he is,” Morgan said. “It’d be a shame if his final season was a bad one for the club.”
Thurston will once again be confronted by one of his oldest footballing enemies, Benji Marshall.
The Tigers prodigal son always turns it on at Leichhardt.
He’s won 21 of 31 matches at the venue, and will return there for the first time since leaving the Tigers at the end of 2013.
“It’s not one of the best grounds to play at,” said Cowboys winger Kyle Feldt. “It’s very vocal ... as an opposition it’s not very good to be there.”
Thurston, who is 0-5 against the Tigers at Leichhardt, nominated the old ground as the hardest venue to play at in the league earlier this week in a Twitter video, saying “Even the 12-year olds spray me there”.