Just looking at the run metres on NRL website and has Haas for 7 runs for 35m.
What an absolute piss take. For a blues side that struggled getting out of their end a starting prop rolls that out.
Honestly though Qld line speed was ridiculous for most of the game. Ref only pinged them offside once too from memory. In particular I think they were keen to shut down Haas
NSW forwards never got a chance to build any speed up. But yeah, Haas didn't do us any favours.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing but I think starting Paulo in his place would have been my preference.
Brown should have got much more time, at the expense of Jurbo who offered nothing either.
Either Yeo should have come on for 13 and Brown to prop or Finucane to prop and Brown to 13. I don't think Yeo & Finucane both should have made the side.
Game 2 Munster goes to sleep and Qld bring on a half. Game 3 things are going well and they bring on a dynamic young hooker. Our bench offered nothing like that.
A lot of bad luck goes into losing your fullback and then a half but I think some kind of spine cover/impact player would have been smart and as it turns out, probably huge. Imagine we straight swap injured Teddy for Pap? Puts game on a whole different trajectory.
At least these young NSW centres will be ready for next year so we can run some positional specialists there (if we had two centres we could have had Wighton on the bench for example, or starting and Walker on bench).
Can't believe all these comments on here saying NSW were dudded by bad ref decisions.
Qld were by far the better team for most of the game. The ref did hurt NSW a bit, but Val dropping multiple tries hurt Qld, thus keeping the score close.
If Blues had more luck with referee they could have pinched the win, assuming Val continued to suck. If Val had been on then Qld would have won by another 10 at least, which probably best reflects how dominant they were for much of the game.
I did raise a few points around a couple of ref things previously but I 100% believe Blues lost the game themselves (through team selection, being outplayed and injury bad luck all more than referee). Only major ref gripe was I thought Kaufusi should have been binned.
I also don't care that Gal said what he did, I wish he didn't but he works for channel 9 now so that is his priority. Just like the referee Blues should have been good enough to overcome this.
