OCLife | sporting life with ANTHONY BARBAGALLO
BARRACKER THE
Make State of Origin a three weekend wonder I’m one of the few rugby league fans, who finds the State of Origin series between NSW and Queensland, annoying and disruptive. Just as the rhythm of the NRL season settles down into some kind of theme and narrative, our best 40 or so players are pulled out of their clubs to spend six or seven weeks in a best-of-three “Mate versus Mate” gladiatorial series where the bounce of the ball can determine the result. The overhyped passions (“Cockroaches versus Cane Toads”); the blue wigs; the terrible, home-town refereeing that almost always mars the game in Brisbane at Lang Park; and the crippling injury toll for so many players; makes me almost dread this annual battle between NSW and Queensland. Not that the football isn’t scintillating, the event a sporting spectacular, and the evenness of the contest almost always riveting, it’s just that it is sometimes just a little too much. Annual matches between the two dominant rugby league states, NSW and Queensland, have existed for more than 100-years. It’s just that they used to be a bit of a representative trial to determine places in the Australian rugby league team, “The Kangaroos”. Teams were selected on residency, so players based in Queensland, played for the Maroons, those contracted in NSW, for the Blues. It was only when poker machine money to Sydney-based clubs from the 1960s, had so bled the Queensland competition of all its best players (Queensland did not have widespread poker machines until the 1990s), that the idea of a “State of Origin” games was first suggested. Most have now forgotten that the idea was pinched straight from Australian Rules football, which ran its own state of origin series in the late 1970s for the same reasons. Wealthy Melbourne VFL clubs had so denuded player talent from South and West Australian leagues, that they were
34 ORANGE CITY LIFE
|
no longer competitive in the interstate competition. However, while entertaining, there was still a novelty feel to the Australian Football state of origin games with club players seemingly reticent to belt their professional teammates in what was basically an exhibition match. In the first NSW versus Queensland state of origin rugby league game in July 1980 — Queensland captain and rugby league “Immortal” Arthur “Artie” Beetson famously laying into his Parramatta teammate, Mick Cronin — laid that fear to rest. And so, as the ad writers say, the legend was born, and more than 40 years of topsy-turvy, thrilling, heartbreaking football, later, State of Origin is still one of the premier events on the Australian sporting calendar. It is also noticeably one of the few times each season, when the AFL with its nationwide reach, huge crowds, and passionate fan base, seems genuinely envious of its poorer northern rival. It’s not the event itself, it’s the drawn out, overwrought nature of this sixweek extravaganza, that I find most annoying. With the game almost invariably on Wednesday nights (originally timed so as to allow club footballers to still play the previous and following weekend), it puts a pause in the week-in, week-out competition. With more than half of the professional players in the game now of Polynesian, New Zealand, and British backgrounds, it also means that the game is not quite “the best of the best”, as it may have been three decades ago. The NRL should move the event to three weeks of straight football with the competition ceasing for that time. Polynesian, New Zealand, and English players can have their own representative series in adjacent Test matches on the same weekends, and we can all get back to the real competition, a little sooner.
JUNE 09—15, 2022