THE Northern Pride has pulled no punches ahead of tomorrow's trial against Penrith affiliate Windsor Wolves, naming its strongest available side for its final hitout before the Queensland Cup season.
Fullback Chey Bird (broken hand) and halfback Chris Sheppard (shin bruising) were the only players unavailable for selection with coach David Maiden wanting to give his likely round one starters a chance to gain cohesion before their grand final rematch against Sunshine Coast on March 13.
Brothers player Ben Fitzpatrick comes into the Pride squad and will replace Bird at fullback.
Clint Amos and Dane Hogan are the only North Queensland Cowboys players in the team.
"This will be pretty close to the team we’ll take into the first game," Maiden said.
"There’s a few guys that are going to be unlucky and miss out this week but to be fair to the guys that are going to be playing, we need to give them a chance to get some cohesion going.
"We’ll be as close as we can to what our team going into that first round against Sunshine Coast will be.
"But we’ll get a couple of Cowboys players back (for that game) as well."
Maiden was relatively happy with the Pride’s performance against a combined Cowboys side last Saturday, despite his team being beaten for the first time in the annual clash.
"We don’t get two points for this one but it’s one that we’d dearly like to win," Maiden said.
"That was our goal all along.
"We also went in with 23 players and it’s tough to get combinations when you’re doing that.
"But to be fair to the guys, they’ve been training and I wanted to give them an experience of that occasion and every player we had to experience that."
Maiden said he was particularly happy with the Pride’s three-try first half, a period which handed the club a 16-6 lead.
"Even though we looked rusty, we didn’t quite have the set-ups there, I thought our polish was good," Maiden said.
"We were playing with width like we wanted to do, we were playing on the edges and we were troubling them every time we did that.
"The second half we went back to one-out passes and we’re just too small (to do that).
"We got dominated, we weren’t going forward."
Size is likely to be a challenge for the Pride tomorrow with Windsor possessing some big forwards given its links with the Panthers.
"They’ll be tough. They’re Penrith’s feeder club so there’ll be some big boys in there.
"These boys will get a good indication so we’ll have to be on our game."
Pride: 1. Ben Fitzpatrick, 2. Freddie Fauid, 3. Brett Anderson, 4. Mark Dalle Cort, 5. Brenton Bowen, 6. Ryan Stig, 7. Drew Campbell, 8. Ben Laity, 9. Clint Amos, 10. Jaiman Lowe, 11. Jamie Frizzo, 12. Mark Cantoni, 13. Dane Hogan. Interchange: 14. Jason Roos, 15. Joel Reithmuller, 16. Rod Griffin, 17. Noel Underwood, 18. Chris Riesen, 20. Alex Starmer.
