Melbourne have given up a commanding lead for the second straight match with a fast-finishing North Queensland scoring three tries in eight minutes for a shock 28-24 win.<\/p>\n
The Storm appeared headed for victory in their Saturday night match at Queensland Country Bank Stadium on the back of four tries from winger Will Warbrick.<\/p>\n
The Cowboys celebrate after beating the Storm.\u00a0Photo by Ian Hitchcock\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Craig Bellamy’s men looked comfortable with a 10-point lead when Warbrick crossed for his fourth in the 64th minute.<\/p>\n
But the Cowboys then fired back at their highly rated rivals with front-rowers Sam McIntyre and Heilum Luki, and winger Braidon Burns, who scored his second for the night, turning the game on its head.<\/p>\n
The trio scored in the 68th, 71st and 76th minute to leave the Storm shell-shocked after handing the visitors their first back-to-back losses since the start of the 2025 season.<\/p>\n
Last round Melbourne were up 14-0 at home before Brisbane roared back to secure an 18-14 victory.<\/p>\n
Warbrick looked like he would be the hero of the night, standing up in a decimated Melbourne backline.<\/p>\n
With Nick Meaney and Xavier Coates on the sidelines, the Storm lost hard-running centre Jack Howarth to a hip injury for the second half.<\/p>\n
But Warbrick combined with halfback Jahrome Hughes for two valuable first-half tries and then scored another two in the second stanza.<\/p>\n
Skipper Harry Grant can take credit for Warbrick’s last when he spotted his winger unmarked and lobbed the pass from dummy-half over four defenders’ heads for his winger to dive across in the corner.<\/p>\n
That 64th-minute try put Melbourne up 24-14 and looked to have put the brakes on the Cowboys’ fightback.<\/p>\n
But it appeared to be more of a brief pause with the home side swinging momentum back with fullback Scott Drinkwater and halfback Tom Dearden piloting the attack. <\/p>\n
North Queensland got off to a flying start through five-eighth Jake Clifford, who leapt AFL-style to take a Drinkwater bomb to score in the fourth minute.<\/p>\n
The high octane match went end to end with Melbourne taking a 16-10 lead into halftime courtesy of Warbrick and the hot feet of fullback Sua Fa’alogo.<\/p>\n
They pushed that out to 24-14 but the margin wasn’t enough to hold out a fearless Cowboys outfit, who banked their second straight win to relieve some of the pressure on coach Todd Payten.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Melbourne have given up a commanding lead for the second straight match with a fast-finishing North Queensland scoring…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":570225,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[568],"tags":[64,63,761,762,158,85],"class_list":["post-570224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nrl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-national-rugby-league","tag-nationalrugbyleague","tag-nrl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=570224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570224\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/570225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=570224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=570224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=570224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}