- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Once again the debate has begun in AFL circles: should State of Origin football be brought back? And once again it is almost certain that the answer will be no. And once again that answer will be incorrect.
I was a latecomer to the AFL. Raised in Sydney on rugby league, I followed the Swans, in a way, but had no real commitment to the game until I moved to Melbourne in adulthood.
I quickly became a bona fide lover of the game, if only because the saturation coverage in this town was such that there was barely anything else for a sports-lover to get excited about.
These days I am a football omnivore, but there is one area in which the NRL, for all its flaws and pettiness and incompetence, has over Andrew Demetriou’s slick megalith, and that is Origin.
State of Origin rugby league is the most ferocious, brutal, fast, skilful, and most importantly, hate-filled professional sporting contest we have. It is the footballing arena in which legends are made, and hearts are broken, and faces are punched, and full beer cans are hurled at referees. It is the contest which every year fills me with feverish anticipation, and quickly proceeds to crush my gentle spirit and reduce me to a weeping wreck as Queensland wins yet again. It is a masterpiece of athletic endeavour, epic drama, and psychological torture to which there is no equal.
Yet the AFL wants no part of it. Oh, the fans do – they’d love it. And it seems that a lot of the players would quite like to see it come back too. But stubbornly, the clubs and the administration purse their lips and shake their heads like brats refusing cough medicine. And to think it was Aussie Rules that invented State of Origin! Shameful, it is.
Why is Origin rejected? Oh, because the players “play too much”; it would be “too big a workload”; they might suffer “horrible injuries”. Seriously? Get your hand off it.
All of those arguments apply equally to the NRL, and everyone just sucks it up and gets on with it. You risk season or career-ending injuries; you risk destroying your club’s chances at a premiership; you risk it all, because goddammit it’s Origin and if you’re not going to go for death or glory for those three games a year, then Artie Beetson belted Mick Cronin for nothing.
Fans of NRL clubs are proud to have their best players drop out to go play for their state .
State of Origin would enhance the AFL in so many ways. For a start, it’d give a bit of relief to supporters of teams welded to the bottom of the ladder. Even with your side getting thrashed every week, you could cheer on the one or two stars in the team, and hope they made it into their state team for you to cheer on in the Origin.
And of course, it would provide a genuinely meaningful next level for players to aspire to on an individual level, rather than the All-Australian team, which is a nice little ceremony, but of course is just a fantasy assemblage. There is the International Rules, I suppose, but I don’t really take that seriously, because I’m not on crack right now.
What Origin would do is make the question of a player being selected for higher honours real. Suddenly he’s not just being congratulated on a good season, he’s being entrusted with the fate of his state, told that he is elite, and expected to live up to that in the hottest of battles. Don’t AFL fans want that? To see their players tested that way?
And oh, the arguments! Imagine how many hours we could spend in happy disputation, arguing over who was picked, and who wasn’t picked, and who should have been picked, and what kind of halfwitted arsemonkeys are sitting on the selection panel. We could be discussing the obvious ingrained bias against (insert team name here) that the selectors have, and the futility of ever hoping our state can win a game while they persist with (insert player name here).
It’d be an orgy of passionate, fanatical yelling matches across the length and breadth of the nation.
But most of all, wouldn’t it be wonderful to see the combinations Origin would afford? To see Goodes, Judd and Brown on the same team, Dean Cox tapping down to Simon Black to pass to Buddy Franklin, or Bryce Gibbs lining up alongside Matthew Pavlich? Or even a couple of players who probably come from NSW? Think for a second about how much you love your Supercoach team. This is a chance to make Supercoach teams happen in real life!
And of course,that inevitably leads to the tastiest ingredient in the Origin casserole: the hatred, and not just the hatred of all other states for Victoria. State of Origin generates the most intense hatred of all, and even better, it generates them between teammates. It would, indeed, be fantastic to see Judd kicking it to Brown, but it’d be even better to see Brown elbow Daniel Merrett in the head. State of Origin would provide the tantalising possibility of Nick Riewoldt knocking Stephen Milne out cold, and we really need to institute it immediately for that reason alone.
There was a time when Aussie Rules was home to the same inflamed passions and violent tribalism as its northern cousin. That’s been swept away in today’s sterile, ultra-professional, clubs-first environment. What a wonder it’d be to get it back.
To have just a couple of weeks a year when the best players in the land are herded into geographical segments, roused to unholy fury, and let loose upon their friends and teammates in a savage fight to the death to prove which side of arbitrarily decided borders produces the most appropriate athletes for this particular sport.
It’s time for the AFL to match-up to the one thing the NRL beats them at. It is time, Demetriou and co, to cry havoc, and release the dogs of Origin.