Queensland coach Billy Slater needed all of six minutes to almost pull NSW’s pants down with a trick play in game one, and what followed in the first half was a series of set plays the Maroons used to baffle the Blues.
Before Cameron Munster weaved his magic to pull another game out of the fire, and Lindsay Collins leapt through the air like Lance Franklin to catch a bomb out of the Adelaide night sky, you can’t say the Blues weren’t warned.
But just six minutes into game one, it was a move no-one saw coming, and if it wasn’t for the desperate ankle tap from NSW halfback Nathan Cleary, it might have been one of the cheekiest tries in Origin history. “You need to just be aware,” Blues back-rower Tyson Frizell says. “You can’t train for what they potentially might throw at you, but you have to be aware that something could happen.”Even if they didn’t score off the trick play from the penalty restart, Queensland posted first points at the end of the same set when Tabuai-Fidow touched down from a Munster kick.
But Hunt recognises it and sends the ball to Munster on the open side, and Tedesco is no chance of making up the ground to stop Tabuai-Fidow gliding past Tom Trbojevic and pouncing on the short kick for the first points. But when it mattered, they came up trumps. Munster was able to skirt past Nicho Hynes and Cleary for the match-winner on a long shift inside their own territory – when they were down to 12 men.Kicking for glory
There were only 10 seconds left in the first half, so it was no surprise the Maroons tried the trick, but it was the formation in which they set up which would have piqued interest.
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