The Roar
The Roar

Andrew P Bracey

Roar Rookie

Joined June 2014

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Fair call Eliot – though I suppose for those that pull up a whisker short of perfect, the no-hitter is a pretty decent consolation prize.

What's the Aussie sport equivalent of baseball's ‘no-hitter’?

Great article Louis – couldn’t agree more!

The concept of holding Origin on three consecutive weekends certainly has its merits. I love the fun/instense buzz that U.S. style playoffs series can bring to contests. I remember being in Edmonton Canada during the Stanley Cup finals during the 2006 Oilers (ultimately unsuccessful) championship run and the atmosphere the series generated and sustained was unlike any I have experienced before or since.

The virtue of the current stretched-out origin schedule though is that is genuinely feels like a series of rep games where good form throughout a season can see players that may have been overlooked for games I or II earning selection.
Holding the series over three weeks during which presumably the matches would be standalone while the rest of the league took a month-long hiatus would remove this function. It would also remove the chance for injured players to recover sufficiently in order to take part in series deciding games and force coaches to select replacements based on form that might be up to five weeks old. Players who had not played in three or four weeks would be asked to step into the Origin cauldron – the result may be a drop-off in the quality of the contests.

Whatever the eventual solution is, the problem does need to be addressed once and for all.
We seem to have this debate every year as the coach of whatever team was doing well before the series starts makes the same arguments Hasler is now echoing.
This is not like the issue of dodgy pointless scrummaging (don’t get me started on that one) – we can’t just ignore it and hope people will just accept it as part of the modern game.
It was the same for Wayne Bennett at Brisbane and remains a key problem for Craig Bellamy in Melbourne.

The NRL needs to come up with a new model that somehow rewards players for good form at club level without punishing the very teams and coaches that are producing and providing the talent that makes Origin the spectacle it is.

Has Origin stolen the competition?

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