No sleep after Origin I for coaches Laurie Daley, Kevin Walters

BOTH Blues coach Laurie Daley and Maroons rival Kevin Walters spent a sleepless night after Origin I, for very different reasons, writes PAUL KENT.

NSW coach Laurie Daley.

SOMETIME around the moment Boyd Cordner got underneath Darius Boyd and saved a try everybody else thought was coming Laurie Daley, the NSW coach, cracked open a Red Bull and swirled it down.

How many this was not even he knows. Five? Six?

He was not even thinking. His mind was on the game playing out before him.

Only 10 minutes earlier he was halfway through another Red Bull when James Tedesco planted his shoulder into Matt Gillett’s ribcage and stopped him cold on the tryline.

Everybody cheered Tedesco, and rightly so.

Nearly everybody missed Jake Trbojevic also in the tackle, which wasn’t so right.

Trbojevic chopped Gillett’s legs from underneath and left him no base to stand on, a tree without its trunk, and Tedesco finished him off.

Everything Trbojevic did made the tackle possible for Tedesco.

And Daley took a swig of Red Bull.

Adrenaline is the drug of choice in the coach’s box.

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There was plenty for Laurie Daley to like about State of Origin I.

Caffeine runs a solid second, though, and this night it provides a combination that means Daley won’t sleep until early Friday.

Something was happening in front of him that was changing everything.

Moments after Tedesco stopped Gillett there he was again on the left edge, this time with Brett Morris, taking Dane Gagai into touch to stop another try.

Josh Dugan chased down Aidan Guerra and, his last desperate act as Guerra dived to score, threw a big right paw over his shoulder and knocked the ball loose from the Queenslander’s grip.

The game was beyond losing by this time but the Blues were still playing as if the result still depended on every play.

This, Daley was thinking, was what he was talking about for so long. Origin efforts.

The Blues were no longer playing for that night’s result but for the next one, setting a standard they cannot back away from now.

One of the sour pills from Queensland’s recent dominance is that, of the 10 series they have won in the past 11 years, the Blues have been good enough to send it to a ­decider six times but lost every time.

NSW players celebrate a try by Mitchell Pearce during State of Origin I. Picture: Brett Costello

The clue why was in Cameron Smith’s comments after Wednesday’s loss.

The Blues, he said, won the moments. For so long Queensland owned the moments.

Daley was not around to hear that but it did not matter.

Instead he went back to the team hotel and had a few beers with the Blues family knowing that by winning game one, he has moved handsomely towards setting up a series victory and, for a moment at least, he no longer needed to think.

Daley finally crawled into bed around two o'clock in the morning. The moment his head hit the pillow 40 thoughts ran through his mind.

About the same time, not far away, Kevin Walters also climbed into his own hotel bed.

Unlike Daley, Walters was taking to bed a tremendous headache.

Artwork: Scott “Boo” Bailey.

Queensland mythology took a beat down on Wednesday night. And not just for the night, but for the future.

Walters has a sizeable problem now. He has slightly less than two weeks to watch tape over and over again and he must decide whether some of the men he chose for last Wednesday simply had a bad night or whether there are no more good nights left in them.

For many years the Maroons have cornered the market on loyalty, as if it was theirs all alone.

I can recall some years ago when the Maroons era of dominance was in its early years and NSW sent out a team it believed was good enough to win but fell short, and a former Queenslander — of the red-headed variety — was in the Maroons dressing room speaking proudly.

“The best thing,” he says, “is they’ll be in there eating each other alive.”

He was talking about the NSW dressing room and it was exactly what happened.

The Blues panicked and made wholesale changes and somewhere among it all they lost their way. Players were brought to Origin that probably never should have been considered and it took several more years before they rediscovered what was important.

The great trick to Origin, of course, is picking the right players to begin with. This is the problem Walters wrestled with in bed.

It was not just the loss but the manner of it. Queensland got beaten 28-4, no small ­margin.

Loyalty has always been easier in Queensland.

The talent is not so deep and so the choices are more limited. So pick the same men and call it loyalty.

The Maroons fell on this by accident.

Still, it guided Walters’ thinking heading in to this series when some of his more reliable men, Nate Myles, Jacob Lillyman and Aidan Guerra, were out of form at club level.

It was a convenient narrative even though it hardly explains why Billy Slater, one of their all-time greats, got overlooked even though he is back fit for Melbourne.

In truth, Queensland loyalty is as malleable as NSW’s ever was. Those lack of options just make it easier.

This place of doubt is somewhere Daley has been before.

It is the great question after an Origin loss.

Everybody else seems to have their opinion, there is rarely uniformity, and yet the coach must make the correct choice next time around.

The only certainty is sleepless nights.

Maroons coach Kevin Walters has plenty of sleepless nights ahead. Picture: Peter Wallis

As Walters laid in bed trying to find reasons for the loss, still not yet sure what was imagined and what was legitimate, the minutes ticked slowly off the clock.

No coach sleeps after ­Origin.

After tossing in bed for several hours, unable to get even a minute’s sleep, Daley got up and headed downstairs.

It was coming up to six in the morning.

He went into the breakfast room and made himself a cup of tea and sat there, alone, exhausted and content.