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Two clichés escaped the battery of footy mega-stars Channel Nine paraded before us in their three-hour extravaganza of advertising interspersed with rugby league.
“Horses for courses” and “rugby league was the winner” were not mentioned, as the pundits fought to come up with an original thought between ads.
Yet, these two forgotten clichés summed up what was, in some sort of contradiction, a night to remember.
To read more Brian Smith, outside The Roar, check out his website SmithySpeaks.
But before we discuss cliché terminology, let’s get stuck into Nine’s clichéd broadcast. Even for a footy head, such as myself, the near-8.30pm kick off was just too much. Does the NRL have any content control over its own game?
Not being at the game, I can’t report on how those who paid highly for their tickets managed to stay sane and sober while we at home faced a maze of interviews, heart wrenching one-on-ones, and inside looks at scenes from sterile dressing rooms we have seen countless times as some the greatest players of our game’s rich history made fools of themselves by whispering for effect.
Please someone tell these people we are here for the footy!
Post-game, go for your life Channel Nine; analyse, bombard us with emotive interviews from overcome young men and others not so young, hit us with match stats and replays from endless angles so that those who want to go to bed can do so and the footy heads can get their fix.
Oh, I forgot for a moment, that’s not a good-for-advertising format, is it. I wonder if it might be a good-for-footy format though.
Anyway back to the actual footy, and of course those associated clichés. The opening passage of play at this highest level is almost always “an arm wrestle”. Despite the physical battering involving every part of the players’ bodies, we persist in using this most inadequate analogy. And this particular contest was the most brutal of “arm wrestles”, featuring some very spiteful incidents.
It seemed “a game of football might break out at some stages”, but that proved to be a false alarm, when Sam Thaiday almost scored close to the posts for a probable 10-point lead. Then we all see an obvious ‘No try’ from a different angle.
Soon after, we heard what an important miss that had been for the Maroons, as NSW surely would not be able to score two tries given they hadn’t scored one in the second half of Origin 1 or the first half of Origin 2.
Really? NSW’s best 17 footballers could not conjure up two tries knowing that they must to win the game? Surely that situation was a completely different mind-set to the previous two halves of footy.
Instead the arm wrestle continued. The thought crossed my mind, as I twiddled my thumbs, that the players might have gone off the boil waiting all that time for the match to start.
In the end NSW won. That’s what made it memorable.
Trent Hodkinson finally beat a defender, ran the few metres needed to cross the line, and then kicked the ‘easy goal’ so coolly that he deserves enormous recognition. Converting an extremely dour performance by his teammates and himself into a memorable victory and series triumph is some sort of individual achievement for a humble, hard-working young man who has faced plenty of disappointments and challenges.
He also proved the theory that at elite level sport the “horses for courses’ cliché is a truism. Any comparison to the replaced Mitchell Pearce in terms of skills and experience is a throwaway thought. But when it came to composure and dealing with pressure, the replacement aimed up. He generated confidence in teammates if for no other reason than they did not expect of Hodkinson as they did of Pearce, who they perhaps felt had let them down in these same circumstances through his lack of composure.
It turned out NSW didn’t need the most skilful, but the most reliable.
That other cliché we didn’t hear? “Rugby league was the winner” wasn’t dished up because the match didn’t deserve for that thought to cross anyone’s mind.
Perhaps the pressure of the occasion cruelled all the creativity, even in some of the game’s greatest attacking gems.
Perhaps the referees didn’t or couldn’t enforce the 10-metre rule in defence. I say perhaps, as we at home watching via the relentless ‘freckle cam’ got almost zero shots of what the match looked like to those of you who were there.
In any case, highly skilled attacking play versus intense and physical defence just didn’t happen.
Perhaps we will all get our fill of footy in Origin 3, when the pressure is completely off NSW and slightly off Queensland. Those proud Maroons surely will not stomach a ‘blue wash’, will they?
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