FORGED IN IRON
Payten reveals what it took to turn young talents into premiership contenders
THE Cowboys’ surprise surge to third on the ladder after nine rounds can be traced back to a brutal pre-season led by no-nonsense coach Todd Payten.
North Queensland won just seven games in Payten’s first year at the helm last season but he stuck to his guns and the tough love approach is paying dividends in 2022.
Payten thought his players needed to “toughen up” over the summer and he put them through their paces over a gruelling three months.
It had the desired effect with a reinvigorated Cowboys outfit taking the competition by storm this season, with their results surprising even Payten.
“I thought we had enough ability, we had some inexperience and I just thought we were losing games in periods of matches rather than moments,” Payten said on NRL 360.
“We needed to toughen our guys up mentally and physically and we just challenged them day after day.
“We threw some curve balls at them at different stages. We’ve got Castle Hill here – we ran up that three times without any warning.
“We got them in really early in the mornings for two reasons; to beat the heat is one and the other is to make them a little uncomfortable about time management, getting out of bed and preparing for training.
“We did a lot of contact, a lot of tackling and we just made them do things that they didn’t want to do day after day. At the moment it’s showing that it worked.”
Payten was asked if he was worried, as a rookie coach, about losing the playing group by pushing them too hard.
He has admitted he put too much “pressure” on his best player, Jason Taumalolo, but said he was never worried about losing the group.
“That didn’t cross our minds as coaches,” he said.
“We had a pretty honest review of the season just gone. We leaked a lot of points and a lot of those points weren’t from the breakdown of the system, it was from missed tackling and concentration.
“So I explained how we were going to train to the players and told them why we were going to do it – and if we looked at our defensive record that was part of the reason.
“The players have been great, every day they’ve turned up willing to get better. I thought they did that all throughout last season even though we lost a lot of games in a row and things got difficult at times.
“There was only one session where I felt like we were a team that had lost a lot of games, but every other day we worked hard and looked to try and get better.
“So I knew we had a pretty resilient group in a lot of ways, we just had to put some finishing touches on it.”