Queensland Maroons star Harry Grant has vowed to cast aside a rare State of Origin shocker, with his sights fixed on orchestrating a comeback.
The marquee hooker has often risen once he steps into rugby league’s most heated furnace, but in Wednesday night’s 18-6 defeat he looked a shadow of the man regarded as the game’s leading rake.
He was hardly helped playing alongside a forward pack who were simply outmatched and beaten physically by their rampant Blues rivals, who – led by man-of-the-match Payne Haas – were clinical through the middle, as five members of their engine room surpassed 100 running metres.
Harry Grant of the Maroons looks dejected after game one.Credit: Getty Images
But after running for just 23 metres while committing a sloppy error, conceding a penalty, missing five tackles and putting a poorly placed bomb out of dummy-half that led to a seven-tackle set, Grant cut a dejected figure in the Maroons dressing room.
However, sporting stitches above his nose with blood still drying from a head clash, Grant was emphatic in his belief Queensland could write the wrongs that played out at Suncorp Stadium.
“Personally, I feel very disappointed. In some moments of the game I let the team down with some penalties and ill-discipline, and then they just got a fair bit of momentum and went on and capitalised,” Grant said.
“If you’re not committed or dominant with your contact they’re on the roll, and then you start looking for those ways to claw your way back into the game, then that ill-discipline creeps in.
“There are moments in games that can deflate you, and maybe we got a little bit deflated in certain parts when we didn’t execute what we wanted to, or we gave them leg-ups out of their own half.
“There was that one on [Zac] Lomax, that penalty led to a little bit of them having field position, and then it was just footy smarts with putting pressure on [Nathan] Cleary when we had a short defensive line – in hindsight I probably wouldn’t do that.
“But that’s part of it when you’re in the game, and you’re touching the ball first so you have to make those decisions pretty quickly. I have a few I would like to change, but … the want is definitely there from the group, the pride and the passion, but we’ve just got to execute that.”
Grant had just returned from a hamstring injury in the lead-up to the game-one camp, his 55 minutes against Cronulla his only game time since the Storm’s round-six triumph of the Warriors.
“Like many of our players, Harry wasn’t at his best tonight, but he wasn’t on his own.”
Maroons coach Billy Slater
But the 27-year-old dismissed the notion that played a factor in his performance, while affirming he should be fit from his head gash to line up for Melbourne against the Gold Coast on Saturday.
“No [the hamstring didn’t play a role], I think you bring a group together for the week, and you really have to capitalise on every moment you get throughout the week and transfer that into the game, and I just don’t think we transferred our game plan from training to the footy field,” Grant said.
“There are parts of the game I would have loved to have back and that I’m definitely not happy or content with, but I can’t change that.
“Once you play a game like that, and you don’t perform, the first thing you want to do is go out there and play footy.”
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