COWBOYS BATTLING ON WITHOUT PLAYMAKER
THE Johnathan Thurstonless Cowboys are daring to dream after continuing to defy the odds with a 23-10 win against the Rabbitohs in Cairns yesterday.
If the Cowboys are supposed to be no hope of winning the NRL premiership without Thurston then no-one has passed the message on to the players.
The 2015 premiers have slugged their way to three straight wins since Thurston’s season was ended by a shoulder injury, a feat they have never achieved during his 13 years at the club, and are sitting equal third heading into the final seven rounds.
The Cowboys don’t have to look back far to realise reaching the grand final without a star player can be done after Melbourne made it to last year’s decider despite Billy Slater playing just the first game of the season.
In the past five seasons the Cowboys have had just a 25 per cent winning record without Thurston but the class of 2017 seems to have turned a corner.
A lot of that is down to Michael Morgan’s emergence as the dominant playmaker that Thurston is and Te Maire Martin has fit into the No.6 jersey superbly in his two games since leaving Penrith.
Morgan has put his stamp on the Cowboys in Thurston’s absence but it was a rounded team effort in front of 11,271 at Barlow Park that pleased coach Paul Green.
“We’d love to have (Thurston) playing but the reality is he’s not,” Green said. “As devastated as we have been that his season’s finished, we’ve got our heads around it. Everyone’s looking forward to the challenge ahead of us.”.