It's been a week. The dust has settled, so let's look at how Origin 2 played out and why Queensland got the bacon.

It's been said many times over the past week how Queensland turned in a perfect 20 minutes at the start of the game. Their strategy seemed pretty simple in that opening stanza: give the ball to the right edge, Sam Thaiday most notably, and run as hard as you can at James Maloney. This not only occurred in the red zone as Thaiday crashed over for the first try but also in the Maroons own half as Thaiday lined Maloney up, which resulted in a strip.

Queensland were able to attack perceived weaknesses on both sides of the NSW defensive line. On their right, they ran traffic at Maloney, poking through the line, falling on their fronts, getting quick play the balls. As NSW adjusted, they attacked the right where Nathan Merritt was defending and ran in a few tries down his edge. Merritt has taken a lot of blame for these 'defensive lapses' but Laurie Daley came out after the game and accepted blame. Jonathan Thurston's passing game was pin point, as it always is when he is playing well. With Thurston running the ball, Billy Slater out the back and Greg Inglis on the outside one could be forgiven for rushing in to put pressure on. Merritt could have chilled on the side line and let Inglis and Slater run amuck on the inside or push in and force a mistake. Merritt chose the latter and came off second best.

As well as their play makers dictating the game by kicking early and long, backing their defensive pressure, Queensland found what I believe to be the perfect combination of playing personnel. The balance of the team is a lot closer to how it looked when Cooper Cronk came off the bench a few years ago. With Daly Cherry-Evans, Josh Papali'i, Ben Te'o and Matt Gillett coming off the bench, Queensland are injected with youthful exuberance, skill and mobility at various stages of the match. This is important as in game one, Queensland looked predictable. With this combination of players, they have all the bases covered with Te'o and Papali'i playing in the middle offering the muscle, Gillett coming on to an edge and DCE coming in to lock. Worthy of a mention here is Chris McQueen who has gone from Rabbitohs utility back, to Queensland second rower. He is a lot more mobile and athletic than Ash Harrison and allows Queensland a bit of luxury in their use of G.I.

For NSW, they (as I predicted) missed James Tamou. They missed his consistent go forward and muscle through the middle. Tamou and Andrew Fifita is a lot more potent than Aaron Woods and Fifita. This lack of go forward may have had something to do with the NSW halves kicking game. It's not that it wasn't up to par with Origin, it's just that it wasn't up to par with the kicking game of Queensland. I would imagine that Queensland will take note of this and ramp up their pressure on the NSW kickers in game three so Daley will have his work cut out for him to ensure that NSW have an equal share of the territory.

NSW must take encouragement from the fact that they were still in the game for much of the 80 minutes. This is despite not having as much as possession as Queensland. They couldn't stack up many points as Queensland's defence was what you would expect and NSW seemed to lack potency on attack. Everything appeared a bit disjointed as they struggled to have the same impact as they did in game one. Despite having limited possession in the first half, they had ample opportunities to build their own pressure but lacked a killer instinct. One try could have flipped the script on the Maroons.

Now we are set for an absolute block buster in Sydney. Who knows which way it will go? We have seen both sides to each team in the two games so far so it's pretty hard to say with any conviction what will happen. No, scratch that. I'll tell you all what will happen in my preview in a couple of weeks.