Wright said the Reds found they were getting space in the middle of the park early and decided to exploit it with halfback McDermott steering the ship.

“He had ‘Suli’ (winger Suliasi Vunivalu) there on his hip, just people looking for work there,” he said.

“That’s where we found we were getting the most pay, trying to go through them a bit.

“We were copping some solid tackles from them, but we just had to stick to the gameplan.”

Queensland’s pack took control in all areas and forced penalties at will, discipline again killing the Force with the competition’s worst side for penalties per game conceding another 12.

The Force’s rolling maul drove Michael Wells over to cut the margin back to 21-10 before Queensland’s George Blake marked his Reds debut with a strong effort from close range.

Zach Kibirige opened the scoring after capitalising on a poor Jordan Petaia handling error, while he picked off a Lynagh pass and took it home minutes from time for his eighth try of the campaign.

Queensland’s James O’Connor impressed at centre in the first half but was substituted at halftime due to an illness.

It wasn’t the 71-20 hammering they copped at the hands of the Reds in round two, but captain Michael Wells was far from pleased with the showing.

“It’s a better performance than that, but it’s a very grey silver lining,” he told Stan Sport.

“I’ll probably have to moderate myself a little bit because it hurts, I really don’t like losing, we didn’t come to lose.

“Discipline probably hurt us a fair bit again, we started good, scored early points, but then they got back in the game by us giving away penalties.

“They did a job on us at scrum time, we profiled what they were going to do and we just didn’t adapt.”

AAP