Melbourne believe they’re about to finish the regular season with a wet sail - and that they don’t need to finish in the top four to win the premiership.
After losing two of their previous three games, Craig Bellamy’s side ruthlessly disposed of Brisbane 30-8 in front of 36,319 fans at Suncorp Stadium.
Not only did the result consolidate their top eight position but it moved them from a negative points differential into the black, on plus-two.
“I think if there’s ever going to be a team that might do damage from that bottom half, it might be this year,” said coach Bellamy.
“The competition’s that close, I’m not quite sure who’s going to finish in the top four. The three that are there now are going to be hard to get out but whoever finishes fourth, I don’t think it’s going to make a whole heap of difference to be quite honest.
“We’re all going hard until the semi-finals, see where the cards fall and go from there but I just think it’s that open. You just see the results each week. There’s some big surprises each week.
“Anything can happen.”
Asked if the Storm were ready to embark on a run, captain Cameron Smith – who became the top pointscoring forward in premiership history in the win – said: “It’s that time of year when we need to.
“You can see the energy is a lot better. We struggled in the first half of the season. We were conceding a lot of points, we were conceding a lot of tries which is very much unlike us.
“The attitude is really good around the place, about striving to maintain standards.”
He said critics of the team earlier this year, who claimed they were no longer the Melbourne of old, had been right.
“We knew we weren’t,” he said. “We knew we weren’t playing to our capabilities. It was frustrating. It’s been up and down but we’ve turned that around with our preparation and our training and all the boys are on board now with what we want to do for the rest of the season.”
Smith played down his achievement, saying: “The guy I’ve overtaken, Craig Fitzgibbon … I was lucky enough to play alongside Fitzy in the 2008 World Cup and he’s a champion bloke.
“I learned a lot from him. There’s probably not a better bloke to go past than Fitzy.”
The Australia skipper also lauded prop Jesse Bromwich as “top three, if not the best prop in the game at the moment”.
Bellamy said he addressed the travails of the Broncos - whose coach Anthony Griffin was sacked in favour of Wayne Bennett - at training on Tuesday. “It was always going to be hard with the week they’ve had,” he said.
“The start of the game took a bit off them by the amount of ball we had.
“We didn’t really talk about it. We were probably aware of it. Basically, I set the scene for the players on Tuesday, about what was happening up here and we were going to be playing in front of a big crowd and against a team that was pumped up and ready to roll.”
Bellamy added: “I thought we could have, or should have, scored a few more points there in the first half. We lost our patience there on a couple of occasions.”
