- First and foremost, Ashley Klein is a gimp. That Qld forward pass he called typified his game. There were two more obvious forward passes in that set he already let go, then the marginal one is the one he pulls up. WTF? He didn't favour NSW or Qld in particular, just overall rubbish. Hopefully Sutton replaces him for the rest of the series.
- Speaking of rubbish calls: the bunker goes back to look at the Paulo try and (rightfully) chalks it off for obstruction, but Klein is cool with the DCE try when Paulo was clearly held back in the scrum and nobody in the bunker wants to look at it even once. Where's the consistency?
- Munster deserved MOM. Like several before him, he epitomised what happens when talent combines with effort. Holmes was next best with some real 1% efforts to help get his side home.
- On Munster, just 12 months ago he was rinsed as a fraud after Games 1 and 2. I remember back in the day JT getting canned if Qld lost a single game. Then there were people who canned Lockyer as a passenger just before Qld turned things around back in the mid 2000's. Now it's Cleary's turn. The one laughable consistency about Origin is how quickly people will claim a top player is a fraud/ past-it after one sub-standard game.
- A rocks and diamonds night from Gagai. Got brushed aside like a rag-doll for both NSW tries, but put on a great hit and was also in the right place to score Qld's opening try. Sums up his Origin career.
- You could see that tightening up their defensive efforts have been a priority for Qld during training, after leaking a record number of points last year.
- Wighton's selection was fully justified (arguably the best for NSW, along with Teddy), and Tupou did exactly what he was picked for. Freddy isn't perfect, but he's been vindicated with his selections more often than not and these were another two examples in his favour.
- Hopefully Latrell is back for Game 2. He is exactly the kind of impact player who could've won the game in the last 10 minutes tonight for NSW, and could've created something out of nothing long before that. NSW seemed to drop their heads a bit after that DCE try and it took them too long to pick themselves up and show the intensity they finished with.
- Cleary and Luai were on the back-foot (figuratively and literally) too often on the 4th and 5th tackles and it looked as if they were playing ad-lib football. Trying to make something out of nothing with too much sideways running with no apparent direction behind it. They're so much better running the ball through the middle and taking players with them for the offload if they can manage it.
- No surprise NSW looked so much more threatening in the last 15 minutes when they prioritised go-forward in attack rather than side-to-side. Need more of that and that same intensity for the coming games.
- Despite some of the comments I've seen, I'm quietly confident about NSW's chances this series (touch wood on the player availability front). During Qld's 8 year run they had series openers where they were outplayed by NSW teams with similar combinations of youth and enthusiasm Qld had tonight, and harsh scrutiny followed about the future of some of the Qld players. Qld would then come out in Game 2 with a much stronger performance and turn things around to draw and then win the series. NSW were several percentage points below their best as a squad tonight. If they fix that (and especially if an impact player like Latrell returns) I expect we'll see a much improved performance from the team the rest of this series.
