- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Sure, I’m levitating with enthusiasm for Game 2 of Origin on Wednesday night. But don’t feed me baloney and tell me it’s rugby league.
Yes, this once great contest of State of Origin has become an unrecognisable weakling of it’s former electromagnetic self. If it stopped to chat to me in the street, I’d have to make an embarrassing attempt to remember it’s name and probably end up calling it Darren.
Remember when it was artisanal rugby league, the thrilling jewel in the game’s navel?
Remember how rival codes fawned over its unique blend of league skills and street-fighting? Back when it was non-inclusive to anyone outside of New South Wales and Queensland?
I yearn for these good old discriminatory days of Origin. It was the way God intended it to be; brimming with appeal and cache, and totally free of out-posted venues and New Zealanders.
Nowadays, after years of misappropriation, the grand old contest has become something like Michael Crocker’s LA eyes and Anthony Watmough’s taut forehead. It’s almost unidentifiable, even by forensic standards.
Is it really the ill-tempered showpiece it once was? Heck, is it even rugby league any more? What’s tinkered with it’s soul? Why’s it so crap?
Here’s some flimsy, poorly-researched speculation as to why. Starting with the low hanging fruit.
1. The contest is dead
There’s two teams out there, but only one of them’s a chance. And this is officially criminal.
Yes, the constitution states that Origin is obliged to be tighter than extracting a wedgie through the eye of the needle. Really, on what other bedrock law would the nation be established?
To it’s credit, the contest upheld its civic duty for almost two and a half decades. But now its nothing more than a crook who contravenes the nation’s statutory regulations with woeful regularity.
Thanks to years of Queensland domination, the balance of the contest is now like its appeal; virtually non-existent.
This has caused New South Wales to culturally evolve in to a paranoid defensive unit who pride themselves on damage control. Look at their reactive selections – Josh Morris gets a start when he’s fit purely so he can choke Greg Inglis like a turtleneck.
Sure, it’s a wonderfully conservative ploy. But everyone knows turtlenecks have no creative appeal unless they’re from the wardrobes of Steve Jobs or the Beatles.
Such impotent anti-Origin strategy means mostly low-scoring, high-tackling affairs of minimal thrills and maximum constipation.
Except for games at Suncorp. Then the Maroons run through the Blues like they’re a line of holograms.
2. It’s not even time compliant
Stuff the rugby league rule book and it’s laws on time; Origin has become so big for its boots that it operates by it’s own clock.
There’s no secret that people prefer their whopper footy games to be strategically initiated at either 3pm or 7:30pm – the times that cater for the Western world’s post-food and pre-sleep habits.
Not Origin though. It colludes with a nagging bitch called television and chooses to commence somewhere close to 9pm. On a stinking weeknight. With a halftime break that runs for the length of a sitcom.
Can you imagine Tommy Raudonikis and Les Boyd waiting this long at the break? They’d have belted each other senseless and served a sentence for affray with enough time to punch a few darts in the tunnel on the way out.
Sure, this strategy may align the game with the profitable prime-time market in China, but it’s not rugby league in my book.
3. There’s no more superfluous brutality
Origin has seen a regrettable decrease in violence over the years.
The scrums, the ruck, the drive past the Caxton Hotel. Whatever it was, the halcyon days would always promise various methods of lusty clouting with widespread bruising right down to a molecular level.
Nowadays, this is a distant memory. The most passionate contest is fought between the tabloid papers and the only medical issues are the ones fabricated by Queensland.
Even Origin’s qualities as a hotbed of antagonistic pre-match panto are dead.
It’s like the hatred has evaporated in to the sky and it’s vaporisation is refracting a peaceful bloody rainbow across the Tweed.
The stage players are to blame for this atrocity. No matter how hard we try here down south, Kevin Walters is impossibly difficult to despise. And as for Laurie Daley, the Queenslanders love him too. For obvious reasons.
The lack of vitriol and facial disfigurements in Origin may be beneficial for attracting children and soccer mums, but unfortunately it has one minor drawback: it totally sucks.
Bring back Justin Hodges.
4. Interest levels are too high
While the eastern seaboard couldn’t give a continental any more, the Origin concept is blowing up tellies right across the nation. People in far-off regions who have no idea about our distorted definitions of passion and loyalty are flocking like lemmings to catch a glimpse of the fuss.
Look at the ratings – if you’ve lost a loved one in this great country of ours, there’s a one-in-twenty chance of finding them in front of a television on Origin night marvelling at the quality of Aaron Woods’ shiny coat.
But is it any coincidence that the quality of the contest has demised in line with it’s booming popularity in new markets? Of course it’s not.
I can’t pinpoint why this is the case, but I guess there is a moral to the tale: Origin doesn’t work when there’s Sandgropers and Victorians involved.
In fact, nothing really does.
5. The death of the bonding session
Players pickling themselves in 90-proof for days prior to playing Origin was not some flimsy unwritten rule, it was as obligatory as attending a team medical to have your hamstrings tested in a sexually-suggestive position by the physio while the media watched on.
Now the only abuse of booze seen is in the obese over-commercialisation of the VB Blues v XXXX Maroons marketing as brought to you by Nine and Holden. Buy a Pepsi right now.
Unfortunately, the frivolity and subsequent public titillation that bonding sessions provided are gone forever.
With the retirement of Mal Meninga, barkeeps have had to return to serving beer, and not even Blake Ferguson’s return to the arena could restore Origin to it’s munted glory days.
Coconut water, night times that involve sleep and no updates on-the-hour from the local constabulary.
This is not the Origin I know.