As the FM radio favourite of the band Blink 182 goes, life is about “all the small things”, the little one percenters that make life livable and stop you from doing something crazy like running away to join a monastery or attempting to use the toilets at Brookvale Oval.
And, of course, when I say life, I mean sport.
Sport exists as a slide specimen of our society, continuously shoved under the view finder of the Hubble telescope where action and consequence play out not in years but seconds.
The NSW side learnt this lesson the hard way on Wednesday night when an excellent hour of defence was banished to a place in the memory bank saved for Jonathon Docking shoulder pads and Leon Bott’s hat tricks by one small moment.
A hasty shallow kick on the fourth tackle, some strong Queensland runs capped off with a final execution that would make any 18th century French guillotine operator proud and ya ya yippee yippee ya the game had slipped through Paul Gallen’s squirrel grip.
Perhaps it was some sort of cosmic, karmic intervention though on behalf of Ray Warren’s football gods as the Blues had tempted fate by ignoring some of ‘the small things’ pre-match.
Not the players themselves, in this case, but rather the NSWRL administrators who allowed for the replacement of players’ surnames with an amateurish looking beer advertisement on the back of the team jerseys.
Anyone who is not Brett Dallas knows the attachment a football player has to his personalised rep jersey and to rob the NSW team of such a ‘small thing’ was lamentable, particular in comparison to the individual named and flag embosomed Queensland strip.
But hey whilst I’m nitpicking how about we bring back some other ‘small things’. Like NSW socks the same colour as their jerseys. Painted in-goals on grand final day. Reserve grade. Saturday afternoon games. Collars on jerseys. Warren Boland!
These may be miniscule, some would argue petty things that upset the average rugby league fan. But as NSW demonstrated perfectly in Origin it is so important to get the small things right, because they are usually the most important things of all.
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