Sydney Roosters players admit North Queensland coach Paul Green knows exactly how they play from his time with the premiers last season and predict that Friday night's semi-final at Allianz Stadium will be a battle between two near-identical defensive structures.
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Green, who cites the late Graham Murray as a mentor, was last season in charge of the Roosters under-20s team and worked alongside Trent Robinson as he plotted a premiership in his rookie season as an NRL coach.
After working with Murray when he steered Wynnum-Manly to the first of back-to-back Queensland Cup premierships in 2011, Green consulted the man who took the Roosters [2000] and Cowboys [2005] to grand finals about accepting the North Queensland job and then left the premiers with the blessing of Robinson.
Now the former Cronulla, Cowboys, Roosters, Eels and Broncos halfback is hoping to emulate Robinson's achievements and has introduced many of the ideas he learned at the Bondi-based club with the Cowboys. "Greeny was in the background here doing a lot of assistant coach roles and I am sure he learned a lot from his coaching here with Robbo," Roosters halfback Mitchell Pearce said. "They have taken a pretty similar style to be honest and they are quite a similar side. They are going to be good, no one has got any questions about that. They have got as good a forward pack as anyone, Rob Lui is playing as good as any five-eighth and Johnathan Thurston is the best player in the world, so they are pretty good opponents. But we believe in ourselves."
Besides Green, the Cowboys have nine former Roosters in their squad - including six who played in last Saturday night's 30-22 defeat of Brisbane at 1300 Smiles Stadium in Townsville. Among them are Tautau Moga, who joined the Cowboys before the June 30 transfer deadline, while fellow centre Kane Linnett, winger Antonio Winterstein, hooker Rory Kostjasyn and forwards James Tamou and Glenn Hall were already at the club when Green arrived. He also signed rookie John Asiata, while hooker Anthony Mitchell and winger Curtis Rona are other former Roosters in the North Queensland squad.
"Greeny is a very intense, switched on guy who and demands success and he has got that," Pearce said. "He has got them in a good position so they will be hungry."
With the Cowboys this season having the fourth-best defensive record in the NRL, Pearce said Green had adapted the blueprint that helped the Roosters to premiership success last year.
"You would be silly not to take systems out of the best defensive team in the comp the year before, that is what we were and he would be stupid not to go up there and take some lessons he has learned," Pearce said. "He is a very good coach, he has done a great job with them and whoever defends best this week will win."
After losing 42-10 to the Cowboys in round 10, forward Frank-Paul Nuuausala admitted that Green had ambushed the Roosters but he insisted they would be ready this time. "He probably knows how we play and how we train so he'll be telling his boys how we play and our game plan hasn't changed from last year," Nuuausala said. "He knows everything that we do, so that's probably the edge that he has over us. [But] we're confident in what we do. He knows our game plan but if we execute our game plan and play how we can play nothing can stop us."
Lock Aidan Guerra, who returns from suspension after missing last Saturday night's 15-14 loss to Penrith, said the Cowboys performance in Townsville was the best any team had produced against the Roosters this season.
"It was a forgettable night, they were on fire and we weren't playing our best," he said. "I think that reminds us that we need to be at our best to beat them at their best. When they were on and they were firing against us we couldn't do much about it back then but now we are in finals football it is a different ball game."
"We were an inconsistent team back then and towards the end of the season we did find some consistency but obviously that didn't continue against the Penrith Panthers so we need to build again. We weren't executing, we were going sideways when we should have been going forward and it was just one of those games where we struggled to find consistent momentum."