Bad news for the Warriors, Jason Taumalolo has been cleared to play for the Cowboys in Friday night’s game against them at Central Coast Stadium.
The blockbusting forward missed last weekend’s 26-16 loss to the Sharks because of bone bruising on a knee.
But Cowboys coach Paul Green confirmed on Thursday that the Auckland born lock is good to go.
“He’s one of our starters regularly so it’s always good to get one of those guys back in the side,” Green said.
While Taumalolo is one of the best players in the NRL, Green felt it was going too far for people to come to the conclusion that the Cowboys can only win when Taumalolo is playing.
“Everyone’s making a lot of the fact that we lost because Jason was out, but we weren’t that far off,” Green said.
“I’m not blaming anyone, but had our left edge stopped at least one of those tries, we probably would have got a different result.
“So to pin the loss on the fact that Jason wasn’t playing, Hessy also wasn’t and he’s a State of Origin player and no one is mentioning him too much.”
Green says he expects his namesake in the Warriors team to make a big impact and expects the Warriors to challenge them up the middle.
“[Blake] Green is the steady head, gets them around, [Kodi] Nikorima is a threat and [Wayde] Egan has made a difference as well,” he said.
“It’s no coincidence that they’re playing a lot more through the middle, but they’re also a threat through the middle too, [Egan] is pretty smart out of dummy half, so we’ll have to be honest in that area.
Warriors winger Patrick Herbert dropped three bombs in the first half against the Panthers, with two of them resulting tries.
Stuff asked Green whether that’s something he’ll look to exploit in this game and he said he didn’t notice that against the Panthers.
So either Green didn’t watch the game, or he doesn’t want to let on that the Cowboys will be targeting Herbert big time.
Some context has been given to the Warriors’ 18-0 win over the Dragons on round three, with the Red V also being abysmal against the Bulldogs last weekend.
The Warriors are a team that’s not as great as they were against the Dragons, nor are they as bad as the team that lost 26-0 to the Panthers last weekend.
“The first week for us was pretty emotionally charged,” Warriors halfback Blake Green said.
“We’d had a month away from home, put a whole heap of energy into that first game for us.
“I’m not sure if there was a comedown from that, but we didn’t play at the same level of energy.
“As we’ve seen in some games, when you miss the boat momentum wise, it’s difficult to get it back and we were chasing out tails the whole game.
“We were just letting them off the hook too easily last week. We had about seven penalties coming out of yardage and they didn’t have to work hard for anything. We have to change that on Friday night.”
This fixture will be the Warriors’ second ‘home game’ at Central Coast Stadium and Blake Green does feel they can have some home field advantage for this game, as the Cowboys will have to fly into Newcastle Airport in the morning, then bus down to Gosford.
“Playing at Central Coast Stadium, it gives us the best advantage because of the proximity to us,” he said.
“It took us nearly three and a half hours to get to Campbelltown by bus last week on a Friday afternoon.
“There’s no excuse to how we played, but in terms of preparation, the best advantage for us is to have games at Central Coast Stadium, while the Cowboys have got a big day ahead of them.
“It’s important that we start physically and put them under a lot of pressure early on in the game and hopefully they can feel the impact of the travel they’ve hard.”
