2016 State of Origin Game 3

Oates was superb out of his own end. He was probably our strongest ball carrier.

Boyd, Cronk, Thurston and Smith didn't run anywhere near enough, even given the defensive workload.

It was probably our worst defensive effort this series. Way too much overreading and poor contact allowing 6 line breaks and too many ineffective tackles. Just lucky the series was already won.

 

Been a pretty harsh critic of Jackson but that bloke played really well tonight. Still think he's a lock.

 

QLD are poor winners - From the guy whose team turned their backs and walked away while our captain was giving his speech and being presented with the shield.

And then he defends the action. lol muppet. Can just imagine what he would've thought if QLD did that in 2014.

 

It's honestly pretty hard to determine how well their halves or in fact their entire team played. We actually got up-field in the first half easier than I thought we would. Scott, Myles, Oates, Gillett were all making quality carries. Second half was a fair bit tougher. We just couldn't get any field position for more than one set at a time. A lot of it obviously had to do with the lopsided penalty count, some of which we deserved and some of which we were stitched up. And a fair bit of it had to do with our inefficiencies in defence (we were really ineffective - so many standing tackles, so many knees and elbows tackles, so many offloads).

NSW's attack from further out made a lot of easy ground by going wide early, quick play-the-balls through the middle, and they opened us up 3 or 4 times with clean line breaks. Inside our 20 though, they were total balls. Side to side, easily read and shutdown. They kept going to Dugan, kept going to Jennings and kept sweeping out the back to Tedesco - They never even looked like scoring from it. When they straightened near the edges and around the ruck, they threatened. Maloney broke through by showing and going, Jackson off Moylan went clear through, and so on.

It's always hard to judge the attack of the halves when you're playing against a side who made 100 more tackles and had 10 tackled in opp. 20's to about 40 and and extra 10+ sets of six. The fact is despite creating and making a few line breaks themselves, Maloney and Moylan did not directly create any points and a lot of the time, came up with shit options, poor passes and dropped balls.

In three games their varying halves combinations came up with a try to Cordner. A try to Frizell. And nothing in Game 3. That there is how you explain winning in every facet of a match and still only getting over the line in the last minutes of a dead rubber.

To be honest, given the way this game panned out and given it wasn't a live match, it's just really hard to evaluate. I wouldn't say this match increased my opinion of the gap between the two teams, but it sure as fuck didn't decrease it either. There's nothing about this performance from NSW overall that makes me think they've taken strides forward as compared to the other two games.

But whilst ever Laurie is coach I think that'll be the case. I'm not remotely convinced Tedesco is the better option than Moylan (if anything probably to the contrary). The halves are still miles off. The utility will continue to be wasted. Oh and they'll probably bring back Mitchell Pearce

 

The irony of course. Ferguson waits until the last two minutes out of 240 to actually fucking do something. And it wins his team the game.

Typical. And does it through probably one of our best defenders on the night.

 

2015 Game 3 the penalty count was 4-2 to QLD after 21 minutes. Not sure about 2014 but I think it was 4-1, not 6-1.

Tart hit the nail on the head. QLD have had the rub of the green over the last 5 or so years. Nobody denies that and some QLDer's on here have been fairly impartial when some of the big calls have gone our way - Inglis's dropped ball from Farah's boot. Hodges's shepard etc.

But we've never had anything to this extent in a single match. It's the biggest penalty disparity in a single half (9-1) and the biggest overall (12-3) at least in the last 10 years and probably in all of Origin history.

Did we give away penalties on purpose? Yeah certainly when Cronk was binned. But even if you grant, purely for the sake of argument, that every penalty against QLD was justified, and every 50/50 should've gone NSW's way (again, for the sake of argument) that still doesn't explain the disparity. Where were the ruck penalties against NSW? Where were the offside penalties? 1 each when the other mob is getting 8 or 9? Nah there's no fair minded person who could rewatch that match and conclude only QLD were infringing. You can find 4 or 5 penalties for both ruck infringements and offside against the Blues with consummate ease. And none of them were blown. Never mind the two or three knock-ons that were not called. Or the general play penalties like Fifita's try that were also missed.

There was only one side being officiated properly last night.