Paul Green needed Michael Morgan to snap out of it, for the good of the team. If he didn't, the talented five-eighth could have ended up being more of a hindrance than a help to the Cowboys against Cronulla.

The North Queensland five-eighth had been overly critical of his return game against the Broncos, where he felt he missed the kind of key opportunities that a player in his position, in such a weighty game, should have eaten alive. When they didn't go his way, Morgan took much of the blame for the first-week finals defeat on his own shoulders. Green knew it was an over-reaction and above that, wasn't healthy for the player or the squad.

The coach wanted the Cowboys to move on quickly and knew it wouldn't be the case if Morgan was toe-punting cans around training all week, deconstructing what went wrong at Suncorp Stadium. "That's an important part of my job. Everyone is different," Green said. "He took last week pretty hard. For us to move forward ... I thought he was being too harsh on himself. That's why we needed to make sure he was in the right head space for tonight and going forward."

Morgan responded with a high-quality effort in the 39-0 rout of the Sharks, chiming in off the back of a dominant pack and being a huge handful around the edges with his running game. He crossed for a pair of tries and an encouraging performance that should have him back to full flight in Melbourne next weekend as the Cowboys face the Storm for the right to play in the NRL grand final.

"I was just frustrated with a few parts of my game, a few moments within that game I was really annoyed about. It was really good to have the opportunity to make up for it," Morgan said. "Normally I'm pretty harsh on myself after a bad game. He [Green] just wanted me to go back and do my job, not to change anything. There were a couple of things last week that if they go a different way, they're all good. I just had to worry about myself and work with the boys around me."

That Green knows the keys to getting the best out of his individual players is a strong tick for the North Queensland mentor. Under his watch, after the loss to Brisbane, Morgan said the Cowboys never felt as if their finals hopes were slipping away once again.

"We'd never lost confidence, I don't think. I think we felt as long as we were in the game it would be all right," Morgan said. "We had a good week. I was personally a bit down about last week but once training was on, it was on. We were there to train and do a job and everyone was on the same page."

Sharks hooker Michael Ennis was very quick to suggest Melbourne are now the team to beat in the finals. Whether that was part of the burn of defeat or a genuine reflection remains to be seen but Morgan knows his side must lift yet another gear.

"I'm sure there will still be parts of the game we have to fix. There's always some errors but it's about minimising them," he said. "We haven't achieved our main goal yet. That's still ahead of us."