Wests Tigers coach Benji Marshall has “noticed a real lift in energy” among his playing group as the team looks to put the Lachlan Galvin saga behind them this week against the Cowboys.

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The Bulldogs are on the verge of officially announcing the teenager’s signature, with Galvin left out of Marshall’s squad this week that travelled to North Queensland.

The Tigers are on a two-game losing streak, having gone down to the Rabbitohs and Storm before the bye, but Marshall sounded confident on Friday that his team is ready to turn that form slump around.

“It’s been a great week of training,” he said.

“Everyone’s looking forward to just playing. We had a week off last week with the bye. The energy around the place has been really good, really positive. We’ve got a lot of guys excited to play.”

That includes 19-year-old Heath Mason, who makes his second NRL appearance of the season having started the year at fullback in place of an injured Jahream Bula.

Marshall said his simple expectation for his new halves pairing of Mason and Jarome Luai is to “just do their job”.

“We’ve seen some great glimpses of play from some of our players this year and we’re coming up against a pretty good Cowboys team,” Marshall added.

“They’ve got a lot of great attacking players, so we just need our halves to do their job and control the field position.”

With the Galvin saga dominating headlines for over a month now, Marshall said everyone is “probably a little bit sick of talking about it” and when asked if he was disappointed to be losing the five-eighth, the Tigers coach said he probably wouldn’t use that specific word.

“I don’t know if disappointment’s the word,” Marshall said.

“Look, at the same time we like our players we’ve got, we love the squad we’ve got. We’re excited about some of the young players we’ve got coming through and for us, we want to try and make a mark on competition this year and with the squad we’ve got, we’re confident we can do that but we’ve got to put it together this weekend.”

The Cowboys will be desperate to bounce back having gone down 24-6 to Manly in their last game, while they have also not won a game since late April.

But the Tigers will be equally desperate and Marshall has seen promising signs in the playing group at training.

“I’ve noticed a real lift in energy amongst the group,” he said.

“Obviously, (we’ve) got a few guys coming in that haven’t played, guys like Heath who’ve brought a lot of energy to the team and then with our leaders they’ve been driving a really good preparation coming off the back of a bye.

“We had a good reflection of where we went good and where we can improve in the first half of the season and we’re looking to put those into place this weekend.”