Opinion
Faster, tougher and more athletic, Origin now has it all bar thuggery
Malcolm Knox
Journalist, author and columnistIn its 43rd year, State of Origin finally has nothing going for it other than the dazzling quality of the rugby league it can put on. Oversized muscularity has replaced oversized personalities.
Speed has out-evolved stink. Players, who nowadays are letting their haircuts do their talking for them, are too gassed from chasing today’s hyperkinetic version of the game to have the energy to punch each other. No breath, no biff.
Which just leaves the football. Fancy that. In its middle age, Origin has gone on a health kick. Clean living at the Olympic Stadium on Wednesday night yielded a dividend of intensity, error, and the finest stress fractures through which brilliance was allowed to shine.
When the Blue wall cracked it shattered, and in poured Queensland, winning a match in Sydney for the first time since 2017. Trounced on their own turf a year ago, Queensland have come down as far south as they would find comfortable in winter, and taken a lead in the three-match series.
For the first time since 2019, a capacity crowd of 80,512 was able to attend Homebush, and there was a sense of pent-up excitement released on both sides of the fence. With winds blowing in from the Antarctic, there were blue fingers and toes to go with the dominant dress code.
Both Queensland and NSW ran themselves ragged in the first stanza. Clattering defence produced dropped balls, forward passes and disjointed attack. Together with some inaccurate kicking, this at least had the benefit of breaking up the foreordained patterns that the coaches had plotted and accentuating the match’s swivel-eyed tendencies to the point, at times, of sheer panic.
Valentine Holmes beats Daniel Tupou’s despairing dive to score the Maroons’ decisive try.Credit:Getty
Speaking of coaches, Queensland’s Billy Slater and his Blues counterpart Brad Fittler did have the puff to comment on the game as it unfolded. TV commentators moonlighting as Origin coaches moonlighting as TV commentators, both were asked to revert to their day jobs and were too canny to say anything other than the bleeding obvious. It was curiously contemporary. Try that one on Wayne Bennett or Craig Bellamy, Channel Nine.
Some individual moments were provided by the outside backs from both teams, who charged bravely into the opposition front line to purchase the hardest of yards. Brian To’o, Xavier Coates (before spraining his ankle), Selwyn Cobbo and Daniel Tupou made sure that nobody can keep describing wingers as people who hang out with footballers.
If a theme was emerging in the first half, it was that this was an Indigenous Origin. After an MVP performance from community leader Yvonne Weldon in her welcome to country (“It doesn’t matter who wins but GO BLUES”), it was her fellow Wiradjuri Jack Wighton who scored the first try for the hosts, capitalising on a scything Damien Cook pass.
The defences were cancelling each other out until late in the half, 20-year-old Selwyn Cobbo, a flyer from Wakka Wakka country in rural Queensland, showed pace worthy of his cricketing ancestor Eddie Gilbert down the right flank, grubber-kicked inside, and laid the ball on a plate for his Torres Strait Islander (Badu-Yam islands) centre Dane Gagai to level the scores.
With so many calories having been spent in the first half, the second was likely to fall the way of the brilliant individuals. Queensland’s Cameron Munster riverdanced his way through the Blues defence to make a significant break, before Daly Cherry-Evans out-stepped two NSW tacklers to score under the posts and give the Maroons an eight-point lead.
Cherry-Evans, incidentally, was clearly outplaying his challenger for the Australian halfback role, Nathan Cleary. Queensland’s strategic choice of selecting alternating dummy-halves in Ben Hunt and Harry Grant was also proving a winner in the lightning-paced game.
Kalyn Ponga’s hands were quicker than the eye to put Valentine Holmes away on the left flank, and Holmes followed up in the closing minutes by flying in like the wind and diving on a loose ball to repel a NSW comeback.
A late Cameron Murray effort brought NSW within a converted try, but the other Cameron, the code’s current king Munster, produced play after play to lift his teammates, towering over the game on a scale to rival his namesake Herman.
Origin has always captured the imagination with its physicality. It used to be the physicality of fists, with a dash of Wally Lewis. Much loved as that was, today’s version is better. It’s a lot faster, it’s tougher, it’s more athletic in every way, and it delivers all the feeling with none of the thuggery. This was a classic, and as Yvonne Weldon almost said, it didn’t matter who won.
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