Johnathan Thurston’s last Sydney game and the heirs that aren’t there
JOHNATHAN Thurston plays his last match in Sydney with North Queensland’s hopes of a win riding on his shoulders — but without the players the Cowboys will turn to in a post-JT world.
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LET’S get this out of the way now — the Cowboys will never be able to replace Johnathan Thurston.
Sure, they’ll have good players fill the void. Michael Morgan and Jake Clifford chief among them. But there’s a fair chance that for as long as the North Queensland Cowboys exist they will never, ever have a player as good as Johnathan Thurston.
PART ONE: JT, legacy and the Broncos
Just like Newcastle will never have another Andrew Johns, Brisbane will never have another Darren Lockyer and Melbourne will never have another Cameron Smith. Thurston may well be the best player North Queensland will ever have.
And just as has happened at Newcastle with Johns, at Brisbane with Lockyer and, one day, at Melbourne with Smith, his spectre will loom over the club for decades to come.
This week Thurston’s farewell tour, which doubles as a desperate campaign to avoid the wooden spoon, heads to Cronulla. It’s his final game on NSW soil and the two players who will form the backbone of the New Cowboys won’t be there.
It was another game against Cronulla, last year’s elimination final, which showed it was possible, that life without Thurston could be a prosperous reality.
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Their two best players that day were Jason Taumalolo and Michael Morgan.
Taumalolo is a forward unlike any other, a wrecking ball with feet like a dancer and an endless, gluttonous appetite for metres. He has the strength of an army and he’s only one man. Against the Sharks that day he scored a try, ran for 234m and broke eight tackles. It was remarkable in a way not even Thurston can match, a display not of rugby league skill but raw, unending physical strength, agility and power.
Morgan was a halfback then a fullback and then a five-eighth and he was always fast, but when Thurston went down last season he learned how to be crafty, smart and canny in a way only the best playmakers around ever do. He went from having a kicking game that consisted of grubbers and little else to a well-rounded, intelligent arsenal of any kick you liked.
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It was against the Sharks that this was fully drawn to the fore for the first time — Morgan’s kicking game was first class all match, he threw a great pass for North Queensland’s other try and, in extra time, he kicked the first field goal of his career to hand the Cowboys a 15-14 win
It was North Queensland’s first finals win without Thurston in 14 years and just their third ever. The Cowboys had experienced precious little success without Thurston, to the point where it was difficult to imagine such an absurdity.
There were other, greater wins in that Cowboys run to the Grand Final, where they were stomped by the Melbourne machine. The prelim victory over the Roosters is one of the great moments in the club’s history. But things can only happen for the first time once, and that Sharks game was the first time that life without Thurston didn’t seem so terrifying.
Morgan struggled once he and Thurston were reunited at the start of the 2018 campaign. They did not click like they once had. Everything was a little off, a little slower, a little out of focus.
Maybe Morgan struggled with the impact of an abdominal injury that dogged him in the pre-season. Maybe they both couldn’t get into a rhythm now that Thurston had slowed down just that little bit — it is only in recent weeks he’s looked himself. Or perhaps Morgan, having experienced what it was like to be the man, could not go back to being No.2 no matter how much he tried.
A move back to fullback and a pec injury followed. The smart money says next year we’ll see a very different Michael Morgan to the halted version of this year.
Taumalolo has continued on, as consistent in his production as if he were more machine than man. His average running metres have dropped form last year’s 194 to a mere 177 — a mark which would still be the second-highest of his career and more per game than in 2016, when he won the Dally M. He may well be the first player outside of the Thurston-Smith-Billy Slater triumvirate in many years to be considered the best player in the world.
Age catches everyone, and the Cowboys’ premiership heroes of 2015 are all beginning to fade. The club committed to them instead of the youngsters underneath, a decision which may haunt them for a decade to come. They cannot be blamed too much. The 17 men who took the field that night against Brisbane will never have to buy a beer north of Rockhampton for the rest of their lives.
But the past is the past and the future is now. Following Thurston out the doors, either to retirement or new frontiers, are Lachlan Coote, Kane Linnett and Antonio Winterstein, with more possibly to follow.
Finding good centres or wingers or forwards or fullbacks isn’t easy, but it’s not the hardest task in rugby league. Finding good halves is exceedingly difficult. Look at Canberra once Ricky Stuart retired, or Newcastle with Johns, Parramatta without Sterling. A club can wait decades for a true, all-time halfback and then spend that same amount of time searching for another. Having a player like Thurston is a solid foundation on which the entirety of a club can be built.
That security blanket, which was torn asunder this year anyway, is about to vanish completely. There is nobody like Taumalolo, but can a large man who makes his money running into other large men as hard and as often as he can stave off injury forever? Morgan is a good bet to be a top-shelf half for the next few years, but there’s no such thing as a sure bets. Jake Clifford has been a star in the juniors, but that guarantees nothing.
Just ask Jarrod Mullen, a player with all the talent in the world who, through a combination of bad luck and circumstance, had a career drowned under the magnitude of replacing Newcastle’s living God, his prodigious talent never fully realised.
North Queensland have enough experienced parts and infrastructure to feel good about their premiership chances next year, but they’d be feeling a whole lot better about them if Kalyn Ponga was still around. Ponga, like Viliame Kikau and Brandon Smith, left in search of opportunity.
He is now a star at Newcastle and seems certain to be a great player for many years. The Cowboys had him and lost him, perhaps as some divine penance for snagging Thurston off of Canterbury all those years ago.
But before any of this can happen, North Queensland must draw on Thurston one last time. Morgan is injured, Taumalolo is suspended and Parramatta’s upset win over the Dragons means the wooden spoon really could be heading to Townsville again.
Cronulla are wily, cunning opponents at the best of times and if North Queensland ever needed a vintage Thurston display it’s right now. Before they can move on into the future, the Cowboys need to live in the past one more time.
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