Watching the replay as we speak...
Liked our start to the game. Boys made good metres through the middle and whenever Hunt would go wide, I thought he threw some great passes to give Gillett, Copley & Reed room. Try was well constructed, if not a little soft. That effort from Hall was pretty poor, he needed to cover Taumalolo who was in the process of sliding but he was too slow on the uptake. In saying that, that's the reason why us fans considered Barba such a neat pick-up because of the doubt he puts in the opposition & Gillett is a great hole runner when given direction. 6-0 Broncos.
Naturally as a Broncos fan, I'm pretty miffed with the JT try. I'm fine with the Tamou pass, difficult to judge on the angle we had but looked flat from the coverage. What annoyed me was the timely tackle five penalty. The referees had two obvious opportunities to award Brisbane a penalty (holding down on Macca, holding back and then hand on the ball on Hunt) but they ignored that and awarded what was really a soft penalty. As for the try itself, in hindsight, Gillett got himself into no-mans land and really should have covered Tamou. 6 all.
The rest of the half was a tussel with the Cowboys spending a fair portion inside the Broncos half but being unable to find the right play. I'm willing to accept that on a couple of occasions, the Cowboys showed why they have yet to really stamp themselves as a premiership force because they made a couple of silly mistakes before JT could weave his magic, but on other occasions, I thought our defence did a wonderful job on Thursto and I thought both Reed + Maranta came up with some very important plays to get us out of trouble. Maranta's work under the high ball & Reed's quick reflexes in particular deserve special mention.
Eventually the Broncos were able to regain the lead 36 minutes in through a a well placed grubber from Hoffman to Vidot who scored his second in as many weeks. I thought Macca was the star of this set, firstly to get the set rolling from a quick tap then to back up, take a difficult offload from Kennedy and find Hoffman who summed the situation up nicely. 10-6 and that was the score that would take us into half-time.
Couple of notes on the first half...
- McGuire actually tackled a kicker twice in this game. In the first half, he covered up Parker's miss on Lui but the tackle was absolutely copy-book.
- Noticed a bit of gamesmanship from Winterstein. Maranta got to one of Hunt's kicks, batted it back to Gillett and for his trouble, copped a cheap shoulder in the back from Winterstein. Don't think it was a shoulder charge but wasn't nice. Also milked the hell out of a supposed push from Maranta. From the clip shown, there didn't appear to be too much in it but the refs fell for it hook line and sinker.
- The reason why Parker came back so early from his stint on the sideline is because Thaiday had to come off. If you watch the game back, you'll notice Thaiday hits the ground pretty hard head first after a pretty poor play from McCullough.
