Let’s get ready to stumble: Fines set to ignite Origin opener

“You never want to lose money, do you?” he said before adding: “But some players would be happy to not miss a club game and pay their way out of it.”

The NRL says there have been fewer charges this season because of the heavy reliance on fines, but that’s club football. State of Origin is a different proposition, played by elite players on elite money.

What’s a lazy $5000 to a player on $800,000 a season if he can rough up Nathan Cleary or Kalyn Ponga? What’s a casual $2500 when tensions are running high late in the game and a defender is laying all over you before whispering some choice words as you play the ball?

Aggression bordering on violence is still the premise of Origin promotion, but matches in recent series have resembled quality NRL games.

Last year, the game’s quicker ruck speed didn’t just allow NSW to run Queensland off their feet but also meant there was little time to niggle, although Blues five-eighth Jarome Luai still managed to get up the nose of almost every Maroons player that came near him.

The matches were so fast Blues forwards told their on-field trainers they were thankful when tries were scored because it gave them time to catch their breath as Cleary lined up the conversion.

The last fight that vaguely looked like an actual fight came in the second match of the 2020 series when Blues big man Payne Haas and Maroons counterpart Tino Fa’asuamaleaui came to blows late in the match.

Referee Gerard Sutton sin-binned both, Queensland coach Wayne Bennett later blamed the whole thing on a “Let’s kick some Haas” headline in The Courier-Mail, and the following year ARL Commission chairman Peter V’landys reminded the pair that rugby league is “not UFC”.

Both players were fined $700 but more damage was done to Haas’ torn jumper than the game’s reputation.

“My Dad’s got that jumper,” the Broncos prop told me in a recent interview. “He really wanted it.”

Was it a fight?

“Nah, that wasn’t a blue — it was a little wrestle. People blew that way out of proportion. Two young bulls going at each other. There’s no friends on the field. It’s Origin.”

Haas and Fa’asuamaleaui have history, but fellow bookends Junior Paulo and Josh Papalii have actual experience in the boxing ring having fought and won separate fights on the same card at the All Stars Fight Night in Canberra last year.

There is also growing talk about Paulo fighting former NSW captain Paul Gallen later this year.

Rugby league — even Origin — will never again feature the streetfights witnessed in the 1980s and 1990s. NSW coach Tommy Raudonikis’ “cattledog” war cry shall remain the stuff of legend, as it should.

But it’s impossible to ignore that Origins are normally won and lost by the forward pack that dominates the most, walking the finest of lines between what’s legal and what is not.

These are uncertain times for the game and indeed Origin, its most prized asset because of the revenue it generates.

Administrators are conscious of the ever-present threat of class actions over concussion; the need to present the code as safe for parents when choosing which sport their child should play; the desire to appeal to a rusted-on fan base that relishes the game’s brutality; and then there’s the primal instincts of enormous, hardened athletes running at each other at speed, wanting to hurt each other, wanting to dominate the other.

Those primal instincts are never more acute than in the furnace of Origin.

Let’s hope Klein lets them express themselves — within reason. I’ll even pay the fines.

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