These 20 minutes are the Blues’ biggest problem. This is how they fix it

According to Blues hooker Reece Robson, there is a simple but effective solution: “Hold the footy.”

“That’s it. That’s all it comes down to is too many errors and putting ourselves under too much pressure,” Robson continued. “I don’t think there were too many completed sets in that first 20 minutes for us, and we just gave them too much ball on our line.”

The Blues had five errors in the first 22 minutes of Origin I, with stalwarts Brian To’o (three first-half errors) and Stephen Crichton making out-of-character mistakes, which Queensland turned into a 20-point lead and an eventual 20-6 half-time advantage.

If it weren’t for the Ponga send-off in the 57th minute, it’s unlikely the Blues would have got back into the game. But they did, and now head to Melbourne with a 1-0 series lead.

“As soon as we started to hold the footy and build back into the game I think we got down there a couple of times,” Robson said.

“We scored a try and got one disallowed as soon as we got down their end of the field, so it just goes to show the more that we can hold the footy and just build our game, our footy is going to be good enough.”

For the fourth straight series, NSW have had to deal with the disruption of losing a player to injury in camp after Casey McLean’s quad strain ruled him out of Wednesday’s clash, with rugby-bound Roosters star Mark Nawaqanitawase to make his Origin debut.

McLean joins Latrell Mitchell (calf injury before game one, 2023), Dylan Edwards (quad injury before game one, 2024), and Mitchell Moses (calf before game two, 2025 and hamstring leading into game one this year) in withdrawing days out from kick-off.

The Blues’ last-gasp Origin I win last month is the only game they have won after replacing a key player midway through a camp. NSW have also tinkered with their pre-game lead-up to try and address their poor starts.

Last year they scrapped what skipper Isaah Yeo described as an “overly emotional” walk from the NSWRL Centre of Excellence to Accor Stadium because players preferred the normality of warming up in the stadium dressing rooms.

Prop Mitch Barnett got through a hefty defensive workload alongside debutant front-row partner Addin Fonua-Blake in game one in Sydney, but he also made the first mistake of the game just 76 seconds after kick-off.

Like Robson, he pointed to the NSW error-rate as a potentially easy fix. But while a 20-point deficit is hardly ideal, Barnett believes teams pulling ahead by double-figure margins isn’t the death sentence it once was, even in the Origin arena.

“The game’s changed now, and I think everyone looks at the game different. Twenty points isn’t a lot in NRL,” Barnett said.

“And you can just see if you have a lot of possession, it doesn’t matter who you are, it’s hard to hold [them] out. If you gift anyone that sort of possession, it’s hard, but we reversed it in the second half.

“Obviously we had a bit of help; we talked about that send-off. But at the end of the day, we won game one, that’s behind us, we’ve got to go win game two now.”

Michael Chammas and Andrew “Joey” Johns dissect the upcoming NRL round, plus the latest footy news, results and analysis. Sign up for the Sin Bin newsletter.