Chad Townsend’s Talk of the Town v Wests Tigers: The hardest column I’ve ever had to write

Cowboys co-captain Chad Townsend unpacked the team’s shock defeat to the Tigers with honesty and vulnerability, sharing insight into the road ahead for North Queensland in the NRL.

Chad Townsend fumes behind the tryline against the Tigers. Picture: Getty Images

This is probably one of the hardest columns I’ve had to write over the past two years that I’ve been doing this.

One thing that I will never do is to shy away from anything so continuing to show up and shape up is what I will do.

Last weekend’s game against the Tigers was one of the most disappointing I’ve been involved in.

As a team I just did not see that type of performance coming and after great wins against the Roosters and the Dragons I really thought that we had turned a corner in our season.

I often talk about the possession stats in my column and how important they are to contributing to a teams success.

Cowboys players dejected after a Tigers try. Picture: Getty Images

The Tigers had a massive 65 per cent of the ball and completed 93 per cent of their sets, leaving us with only 18 minutes with the ball.

In this game the team who maintains possession and forces the opposition team to take usually wins and that’s what the Tigers did to us for almost the whole 80 minutes.

We were beaten by the punch from the very start.

Coen Hess leaving the field after the 66-18 defeat. Picture: Getty Images

They ran harder than us, they tackled harder than us and on a night both teams had so much to play for we just didn’t show up, and that is the thing that hurts the most.

If you go through all the stats it will show you that we were on the wrong side of every single one but in this game it can be as simple as just watching which team is running harder and which team is tackling harder that shows the real difference.

I got asked in the post match press conference how do you bounce back on a loss like this.

There’s no big fancy answer on what can get a team to bounce back but what I am a big believer in is that we must focus on the basic fundamentals of the game and it can be a simple message like ‘run hard’ and ‘tackle hard’ that can narrow our team’s focus.

Junior Tupou fends off Tom Dearden. Picture: Getty Images

This competition is a rollercoaster, there are many ups and many downs, there is adversity, there are setbacks but through it all you must stay focused on the things you can control.

I don’t want to hide from last weekend result, as a team we must own our performances together, but we also must stick together because we are the ones who are going to fight this weekend for a win against Parramatta.

What we must do now is get back to training, train hard, work on those basic fundamentals, narrow the mindset and compete as hard as we can because when our team is doing that we can play great football.

At the moment the gap between our best performances and our worst performances is just too big and it’s not going to hold up over the course of a 27 Round NRL season.

Originally published as Chad Townsend’s Talk of the Town v Wests Tigers: The hardest column I’ve ever had to write