With his coach declaring him back to his best, Cameron Munster says the emergence of Jahrome Hughes as Melbourne's chief playmaker this season has allowed him to reinvent himself.
With crowd noise blaring from the speaker to replicate a full-house at AAMI Park, the Storm completed their final training run before their NRL preliminary final on Friday night against the Sydney Roosters.
The Storm will be at full-strength for the grand final qualifier with coach Craig Bellamy lauding Munster's endeavour to recover from a serious groin injury which threatened his season.
The 30-year-old and wife Bianca are also dealing with the recent arrival of his daughter Blake seven weeks early, joining their two young sons.
Munster missed the first four rounds of 2024 and then a further nine mid-season, but Bellamy feels he has regained his match-winning touch.
"He missed a lot of time and I think it took him a little while to get back to where he wanted to get to and where we wanted to get to," Bellamy said at training on Thursday.
"I think over the last two or three weeks, we've seen real good signs of him doing what he does well and doing what we need him to do to be as effective as he can for us.
"It's been a tough period for him off the field, but he's handling it really well."
The figures back up Bellamy's belief with Munster producing arguably his best performance of the season in their 37-10 qualifying final win over Cronulla.
He opened the scoring and finished with 22 carries for 174 metres, breaking nine tackles.
With halfback Hughes a Dally M favourite after his break-out season, Munster said upon his return he decided to change his own game.
"I've probably done more of a fullback role instead of being that number one playmaker," Munster said.
"I probably could go back to doing that type of stuff, but when you've got Jahrome playing the footy that he's doing and steering the team around, I pretty much just came back and thought, 'You know what, I can play a bit different'.
"Not being on the ball a whole heap and if I am, I'm running it a little bit more, just trying to change the game a little bit more for myself.
'A lot of teams do a lot of homework on certain players, and I'm just trying to do something different that they haven't seen from myself and it's working a little bit, but I'm sure I can evolve a lot more."
Bellamy said their preparation had gone smoothly, with the minor premiers relishing an extra week off and entering the final on the back of a big win.
Last year they lost their week-one final to Brisbane and were then eliminated in the preliminary final by champions Penrith.
"They've come back nice and fresh and we've prepared well this week," Bellamy said.
"I'm not quite sure how the mentality goes sometimes, but certainly our last two games of the year were good, and in that final, that was a really good performance.
"We stuck with what we planned to do and we got away at the end so hopefully we can do that again."
