State of Origin: NSW u20s coach Dean Pay could show senior Blues side how to win Origin

MENTAL strength. Simplicity. Forget meditation and bring the hurt. NSW u20s coach Dean Pay could show senior Blues side how to win Origin, writes PAUL KENT.

DEAN Pay was never one to be conned by new ideas. Even today, he sounds like he is chewing a piece of straw when he talks.

Simple and solid values have always been Pay’s way.

By way of example, Pay was making a small reputation at Canterbury when he was picked, in something of a surprise, for Country to play City in 1994.

It seems like a lifetime ago today but that’s the thing; quality never expires.

Pay had skill and a lot of whack in defence and as he approached his 25th birthday, Country selectors thought he might be able to do the job against the bigger and better City pack which, along with the other truth — that there was not really anyone else — Pay got the job.

It was his first rep game.

What Pay did that night can never be properly described. The defining sound of the game was the air coming out of the City forwards when he hit them.

He hit them so hard and so often that by the end of the game not one of them was taking a hit-up without first looking to see which side of the ruck Pay was defending.

He played so well he gave Phil Gould no choice but to pick him for NSW.

Then he did the same to Queensland. He went away with the Kangaroos at the end of the year.

As well as being an assistant at Canberra, Pay now coaches the NSW under-20s, the curtain raiser before Game III next week. Here, frustrated NSW fans, is the future.

Since age group football became Origin-based four years ago Pay has coached NSW every year; four games for four wins.

The under-16s and under-18s have had less luck, but his influence is even beginning to rub off there. And the trick to it is simple. Simple and solid.

“Sometimes I have got more talented kids out there but for some reason or another you identify the kids with the mental capacity to handle it,” he says.

“That’s what you try and pick them on. It’s very plain and simple.”

It’s not skill. Not talent. He picks players you can win with. Then it’s a lesson the current NSW team could do with listening.

The Blues look for cheap victories. They niggle, but give away a penalty. They chirp at the referees. It comes under the banner of gamesmanship and there are times it can be effective but there are times when it is counter-productive, too.

They collapse in tackles, for example, to milk a penalty for a leg pull. When it doesn’t come off Queensland get another second in defence to set their line and what advantage NSW could get from a quick play-the-ball is gone.

Small moments with big consequences.

Pay coaches those bad habits out of his players, not into them. Like Queensland has done for a decade. To him, that’s Origin. Don’t give yourself an excuse.

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“In Origin the ball never seems to go out,” he says. “You’ve got to keep turning up and doing all the small things really well.

“It’s turning up and doing the right thing all the time. It’s the toughness that comes into it when you’re under attack, when you fatigue and you’ve got a job to do and you’ve got to turn up and do it properly.”

In recent years the Blues have gone in all sorts of directions. They train at resorts, have recruited sleep doctors, administered daily saliva tests that can determine whether the players had a beer the night before and what the brand was.

Pay has none of this new-age thinking. That’s not Origin. Instead, he teaches success.

“With these kids, what I’m trying to coach, the main thing, is to limit our errors, run hard, tackle hard and make sure you turn up where you’re supposed to be, because you’re teammates will know if you’re not,” he says.

When Jamie Feeney, the NSW under-16s coach, saw Pay’s methods he knew his own had to change.

“He has taught them in a short space of time what Origin is about and made them buy into the fact that, playing for NSW, we don’t like Queensland,” Feeney says.

All the other stuff, the new age stuff popular with some, was gone.

“It’s really, really simple, but it’s so effective,” Feeney says. “He doesn’t coach a lot because there’s not the time, but he has them ready to play.”

So far four players from Pay’s under-20s have graduated to Origin; David Klemmer, Boyd Cordner, Jack Bird and Dylan Walker.

Like he once did himself Pay knows the trick to winning Origin. And you can’t find it meditating and singing Kumbayah.

Plain and simple, it is delivering the hurt.