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Without invoking Betteridge’s Law of Headlines – any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’ – there is some question regarding whether the team that Brad Fittler has picked for his 18th and, most likely, final State of Origin match can actually triumph over Queensland on Wednesday night.
Obviously, the Blues can win: despite the two defeats already this season, this is still a Blues side with a host of champion players, playing on its own turf, and with something to play for too. But it’d be a brave tipper who chose them given the evidence seen so far.
It’s fairly well-trodden ground by now, but the major issue that thwarts NSW as a team is not an absence of playing talent, but an inability to arrange that talent in such a manner that can defeat Queensland.
Fittler has had 17 cracks at the Maroons and split the difference, with eight wins, nine defeats in his time as coach. For his part, he can square that ledger on Wednesday too.
The issue that has plagued him, for this series and the last at least, is that his cattle have always been better.
The bookies have had NSW as favourites for 16 of the 17 matches he has coached at Origin level, and while Queenslanders might but this down to typical south-of-the-Tweed arrogance, the folk with money on the line don’t carer about such things. They care about backing the right horse, and set prices accordingly.
Queensland began the last game as favourites and will so again, by a hefty $1.65 at time of writing according to PlayUp. They’re voting with their bank accounts.
To return to the original question: can the Blues win? And if so, how?
The team selected for Game 3 is a shadow of that which was named in Game 1. Some of that is injury-related – losing Nathan Cleary, Payne Haas, Api Koroisau, Tom Trbojevic and Latrell Mitchell will weaken any side – but plenty isn’t, with the same question marks that hung over the NSW camp ahead of the clash in Perth still there.
Fittler is yet to come up with any coherent plan to stop Queensland’s fairly simple, yet effective tactic of jamming the ball-playing lock and starving service to the outside backs.
When questioned last week on his reasoning for swapping Isaah Yeo to the bench and naming Cam Murray in the starting 13, he merely said that he thought he would change things up, with nothing else added.
He’s also yet to serve up an interchange bench that makes sense, and refused questions on the subject entirely.
The wider tactical set-up of the team began as the mini-Penrith and now appears to be either a mini-Souths or a team split right down the middle between the two.
In Game 1, there were six Panthers, including four of the five pivots, if you include the recently-departed Koroisau. Now there are four Bunnies, including three of the five pivots.
MUDGEE, AUSTRALIA – FEBRUARY 27: Cody Walker of the Rabbitohs celebrates scoring a try with Latrell Mitchell of the Rabbitohs during the Charity Shield & NRL Trial Match between the South Sydney Rabbitohs and the St George Illawarra Dragons at Glen Willow Regional Sports Stadium on February 27, 2021 in Mudgee, Australia. (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)
It seems unlikely that the best of what South Sydney can do can be translated to Origin level.
When they are on song, the Bunnies excel in playing to points, then rapidly going through hands, with both halves linking on the same side of the field, Murray digging deep into the line and Mitchell providing the threat out of the back.
There’s a big problem if Fittler opts for this, and for several reasons. For one, this combination hasn’t really worked in clubland without Latrell, because he provides the run threat that forces the edge defence to hold, creating the space in which to ball-play.
James Tedesco is excellent at a lot of things, but he doesn’t have the size or ball-playing of Mitchell and, crucially, prefers to play between the width of the tramlines rather than skirting towards them. It’s not to say that he can’t do it, but what’s where he is at his best.
Secondly, the Bunnies play in the NRL where the teams are not as good as Queensland. They have pulled it off on occasion against Penrith, who have the best line speed in the comp, but the Maroons will be even better at it given that all their players are, by definition, rep players.
There are a lot of ways in which rep footy isn’t as good as club footy – notably, team cohesion – but line speed isn’t one of them.
There’s nothing to suggest that the defensive strategy Billy Slater has enacted in all of his previous Origin games won’t be just as effective against Souths’ style as it was against Penrith’s.
That cohesion aspect is vital, too. When Souths beat Penrith in April – thanks to a sweeping backline move that bested their line speed, no less – their coach, Jason Demetriou, harked back to the early days of preseason, mentioning how many reps had gone into icing that type of play.
Guys like Campbell Graham and Isaiah Tass do hours of training on quick catch-pass – and hte backrowers on decoy and support runs – so that they can pull off such a high-skill, precision timing move.
Again, it’s not to say that the Blues backline can’t do it, because they’re all champion players, but however good they are, expecting them to replicate in ten days what Souths have been doing for years is a huge ask.
The alternative which has been floated has been almost splitting the attack between the left, where the bulk of the Souths’ talent is, and the right, which will see Mitchell Moses link up with Panthers duo of Brian To’o and Stephen Crichton.
It’s not that bad an idea: they’re all good players and can work well together. It could work well, especially if it reduces the amount of structure in the attack, which in turn, will reduce the ability of the Queensland defence to spot the play.
Mitchell Moses of the Blues is tackled during game two of the State of Origin series between the Queensland Maroons and the New South Wales Blues at Suncorp Stadium on June 21, 2023 in Brisbane, Australia. (Photo by Chris Hyde/Getty Images)
NSW’s repeated failings in good ball attack have largely been due to how slow and predictable they have been, with the best moments coming from pure club combination football – Jarome Luai’s pass to Liam Martin in Game 1 – or improvisation, notably in the first half of Game 2 through Moses.
With Cody Walker in this team, the potential for better unstructured play goes up, especially if Moses is also empowered by the coach to play the game in front of him.
Whether they get the space to do that, however, will be down to the success or otherwise of Fittler’s other great great gambit – NSW’s middle.
In this regard, the baby exited with the bathwater after Game 2, because Junior Paulo departed alongside the injury to Haas.
For a man who had trumpeted club combinations frequently, he chose to split up the best front row pairing in the NRL by ditching Paulo and recalling Reagan Campbell-Gillard. Paulo would have been among the first names on the teamsheet in Game 1, but is now in the wilderness again.
RCG is certainly a good player and probably should have played more Origin than he has, but including him and not his mate, especially when Jacob Saifiti has been selected, is a confusing call to say the least.
Paulo and RCG can and do play long minutes for Parramatta, which allied with the selection of Jake Trbojevic – a workhorse, defence-only prop – could have given scope to add Spencer Leniu as a short minute option or, even better, allowed the Blues a four-man middle rotation.
Now, there are three props plus Isaah Yeo, who is exceptional in many areas but not an impact player off the bench.
Murray will start in the 13, which can provide a point of difference through his ball-playing and fast play-the-ball, but unless Yeo is in the team to cover minutes at lock or allow Murray to play as a prop, it’s hard to see how this rotation will work in practice.
One of the two will have to do minutes in the middle – or an edge if Martin plays middle – but whatever form it takes, it will be suboptimal as a rotation, particularly when compared to the simpler set-up of just picking another prop.
Junior Paulo scores but it was no try as Pat Carrigan is impeded by Cam Murray in Origin I. (Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)
Fittler’s interchanges in the previous two games have left much to be desired: in Game 1, Tevita Pangai junior got just 27 minutes and Paulo 30, while in Game 3, Stefano Utoikamanu got 13 minutes.
At Suncorp, Haas played 50 and 67 – Paulo, again, got just half an hour – with Murray worth half an hour in the middle.
RCG averages 53 minutes in the NRL and Jurbo tends to play the 80 for Manly, but often at lock as well as the front row. Jacob Saifiti gets 42 for Newcastle.
There are 160 minutes to go around in the front row and 172 average minutes from the three men selected – assuming that Jake Trbojevic goes the distance as he does at club level, which is not really sustainable in Origin. They’re alsop just three bodies covering a job normally done by four.
The maths simply don’t work and those minutes are going to have to be sourced from somewhere else, which will mean Murray or Yeo as a prop or one of Martin or Keaon Koloamatangi moving in.
Improving the attack will come from winning the middle, which doesn’t seem likely given the team that has been picked.
It’s these two aspects that make the Blues such big outsiders for what should be a fairly even contest.
They’ve not been able to break down this Queensland team despite significant opportunity in the previous two games, with better squads available. Five line breaks across 95 sets tells its own story. Queensland managed nine from 78 sets.
Swapping Panthers for Bunnies might ask a different question, but it doesn’t change the conversation. Origin, as ever, will be won in the middle and settled out wide – and in neither area could it be said that this NSW team looks better.
They can win, of course: rugby league matches fundamentally are about effort and intent before they are about tactics and talent, and with a sweep there to be stopped, that might be enough.
As much as Queensland say they are motivated, they have already won the shield and the drive to not be embarrassed if stronger than the will to rub your rivals face in it. Whatever the score, the Maroons know they’ve won.
But if the plan was to right the wrongs of the first two fixtures, then the Blues have hardly set themselves up for success.