Queensland great Gorden Tallis is promising more State of Origin pain for NSW if the Blues forwards don't aim up in Wednesday night's series opener in Sydney.
Tallis on Tuesday laughed off newspaper taunts targeting Queensland enforcers Nate Myles and Aiden Guerra as Maroons weak links and challenged the Blues pack to walk the walk at ANZ Stadium.
"Their forwards have to dominate. It's as simple as that," Tallis said.
"As much as we want to talk about (halfback Adam) Reynolds and all that, the backs have got to get time and space and have your forwards ripping in and working for each other, dominating.
"Not for 10, 15 minutes. For the majority of the 80 minutes working together, dominating in the middle of the park.
"It's very hard to win if your forwards are getting dominated."
Tallis believes the Blues have shown their hand with the selection of monster forwards David Klemmer, Andrew Fifita, James Tamou and Aaron Woods.
"That's big timber, mate. That's really big timber," he said.
Tallis said he laughed at a Sydney back page dubbing Guerra as Aiden Error and Myles as Nate Mild.
The article pointed out that Myles hadn't made a line break in four years.
"I can tell you something: Nate's not in the Queensland side to make a break," Tallis said.
"He knows what he's in there for, but he's not going to make breaks.
"Aiden Guerra, he's played five-eighth a fair bit because of the lack of Roosters. So he's tried a lot more this year because of Boyd Cordner, no Jared Waerea-Hargreaves so there's reasons for those (mistakes).
"But we'll find out tomorrow night whether they deserve to wear the Queensland jersey or not."
Tallis had no doubts the Maroons wouldn't care less about the sledges.
"If you need a newspaper headline to make you want to play for Queensland, we don't need you to play for us," he said.
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