April 2025

The Cowboys: looking good?

Welcome to Bovine Bulletin, a monthly newsletter about the North Queensland Cowboys.

This is, without a doubt, the single biggest rugby league story of the year and possibly one of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed.

People will say:

‘Oh, it’s not a big deal.’ Why is he hiding it then?

‘It doesn’t make a difference anyway.’ Then why do it?

‘The graininess of that screen cap of a phone video from the stands make it look more incriminating than it is.’ Look at the evidence in front of your eyes!

‘It’s just bloody water on a synthetic ball. It doesn’t matter!’ What happened to our society? It’s bloody un-Australian is what it is.

If the Cowboys did it too, and I make no admissions, that’s just good gamesmanship.

I could excuse the cheating in the ruck and the probable doping program operating out of Penrith that would put US Postal to shame but I draw the line here. Once this alleged trainer has been extradited to stand trial at The Hague, he will presumably to be sentenced to a lengthy stint at Abu Ghraib or another equally appalling human rights abuse doubling as a CIA black site.

Now that unpleasantness has been dealt with, I thought the Cowboys played well in their draw against the Panthers. I am impressed.

We’re nine games into the Cowboys’ 2025 campaign and the players have started to reach something like good form. Now they’re up to speed, the middles and rotation have enough beef to go physically toe-to-toe with the good teams and create some space. This is a team that doesn’t particularly need the services of Reuben Cotter right now. Sam McIntyre will do a pinch. I thought John Bateman would be an embarrassing signing in the pre-season but he’s held together well enough. I am a big Jeremiah Nanai detractor but he’s starting to really compete.

The spine have enough time with each other to put together plays on an ad hoc basis, which mostly revolves around Tom Dearden running at the line and tackling with his whole ass, Jake Clifford putting in the long kicks and Scott Drinkwater doing whatever his body decides to do at any given moment in time.

Murray Taulagi has woken from his Rip van Winkle slumber to start putting together some decent footy in time for Origin. Jaxon Purdue has been both revelatory and electric and could very well join him. Rob Derby had a bad night but is clearly has the tools to put together a long and distinguished career. Even Viliami Vailea, who I thought might be a huge liability, is playing well enough to hold down a spot and keep Zac Laybutt in QCup¹.

Did the Cowboys defeat the the soul-crushing, gravel-grinding, meat-paste producers of the earlier parts of this decade? No, this is not quite that iteration of the Panthers but you can still see elements of that team in this team. Penrith of 2025 are less a clean break from the past than its deformed offspring.

Perhaps the most impressive feature of this game was that North Queensland looked out of gas coming into the final five minutes, relenting under the pressure of the Panthers’ attack, but managed to hold it together until the second part of golden point when Penrith were equally gassed. While they got lucky with Mitch Kenny’s frankly inexplicable decision to not go to Cleary in the Panthers’ one real shot to win in regulation, I would have written almost all of this post had the Cowboys lost, won or, as it turned out, drawn.

If the worst thing that happens to your team in a relatively high stakes situation is they repeatedly fail to set for a field goal and an inexperienced winger drops the ball half a dozen times, those are two fairly easy to fix problems. The main thing is the team is competitive. Glance at the other Queensland clubs if you need a reminder of how badly it can go when a team has structural issues.

You might harbour doubts that this means that the Cowboys are not polished enough to beat the good teams but there are no good teams in the 2025 Telstra NRL Premiership. The Storm like hammering minnows but can lose their bundle. The Bulldogs are a defensive powerhouse except when the Backstreet Boys go to town for 40 minutes in the rain. The Raiders are all over the shop. The Warriors might not have a high enough ceiling to go with the best on their day. The rest of the league has their shoelaces tied together.

Still, lots of people don’t come to this newsletter for unbridled enthusiasm. They come here for tempered expectations. 2023 featured a run like this, starting in round 16 with wins over the Storm and Panthers (back when that meant something) and coming to an abrupt end in round 22 at the hands of the Titans. I got excited about that too and the season was terminated with a damp squib of a win-and-in game against the Panthers, lost 44-12. In 2021, a terrible year by all measures, the Cowboys won six of eight after starting 0-4 and finishing with just one win in the remaining schedule. In 2024 and 2022, years that featured finals wins, streaks like this are harder to detect. The Cowboys won a lot of games, mostly against teams that were worse than them and lost the occasional game against better teams.

I'm not quite ready to conclude that the Payten Referendum is looking as solid as a second term Labor government, we’re going to have to wait for the postal ballots to come in and double check the preferences to make sure we’ve got it right, but the swing is on.

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