Off-colour and overstretched … and that was just Maroons’ jerseys

If Queensland are to be Queensland again, the first thing they need is a maroon jersey that stays maroon.

The material they wore at Lang Park on Wednesday night, when stretched, lost its colour. The men inside, when stretched, lost their lifeblood. They were somehow less we have come to expect. They were without their usual Queenslandiness.

It may seem beside the point to focus on symbols, but what else is Origin? That anaemic Queensland jersey also bore, as its central sponsor, the name of a bank formerly known as the Bank of New South Wales. On home turf, Queensland were in danger of mortgage default. New South Wales owned them.

In a win that was convincing yet scrappy, the Blues had their bankers. The colossal Payne Haas and the admirable Angus Crichton were as outstanding as reminder letters. Laurie Daley had chosen five players from the team running last in the NRL, which must be a first for Origin.

But the Penrith five, who used to win pretty, hadn’t forgotten how to win ugly. Isaah Yeo led from the very front of the front, so versatile in reading the play that when he wasn’t needed to set up his outside men he turned himself into a battering ram.

Nathan Cleary, Dylan Edwards and Liam Martin played in a way to suggest that in this most anomalous of NRL seasons, the Panthers might still have a chance. Little Brian To’o, who has missed several games for Penrith, kept having to catch Queensland kicks.

Overstretched: The Maroons’ jerseys lost their colour when pulled.Credit: Getty Images

And he kept running back at men twice his size, put a dent in them and sometimes offloaded too. His only mistake was one that saved a try, when he pulled down his taller opposite number in a case of, ‘Here’s your Coates, what’s your hurry?’

As things tended to do all night, the resultant sin-binning came at the worst time for Queensland – after the half-time siren, when they could capitalise only by scoring two points.

Most of Queensland’s wounds in the first half, when the game was lost and won, were self-inflicted. There was the bloodletting from Harry Grant’s face after it caught Lindsay Collins’s melon. More to the point, they conceded six penalties to NSW’s one. By the end of the night, they had dropped the ball more often than Henry VIII dropped wives.

That said, the other banker in Origin is a Queensland comeback. When the pale-Maroons staged their customary Lazarus act, however, their attack was less well-oiled than the NSW defence. Anything on the Stephen Crichton side of the field was not worth trying. The crunch of the Blues’ midfield tackling was severe. While the Cleary-Mitchell Moses halves partnership was a curate’s egg, both of them tackled like forwards, tellingly and repeatedly.

Outgunned: Tino Fa’asuamaleaui is surrounded by Blues players.Credit: Getty Images

Still, Queensland (and some abysmal NSW goalkicking) kept the score tight. Latrell Mitchell’s hands were light enough to produce a try for To’o before half-time, but after the break they were also light enough to spill the ball and gift a four-pointer for Coates. It was the usual Mitchell flipside, the sublime on show, the ridiculous in close pursuit.

The game as a whole? Not the greatest. Not even the goodest. Rugby league fans are so spoilt – by Origin every year, by the NRL every weekend – that anything less than a classic Origin can feel a little bit so-so. But this one really was pretty forgettable. The battle for field position predominated, as always, but sets were often finished by dropped balls, bad passes, high tackles, penalties or misdirected kicks. It was no sort of encore to the epic that finished last year’s series.

Not much from Cameron Munster or Kalyn Ponga, not a whole lot more from Cleary and Moses. Given the talent on the field, the brilliance only came in flashes, the final one from Connor Watson, a dynamic addition from the bench, popping an improbable pass for Edwards to score the sealer.

Queensland need more than sealants, more than Lululemon outfits, more than synthetics to glue themselves back together. The peanut gallery had called time on Daly Cherry-Evans before the game was over.

Their forwards need some bigger bodies to plug the middle. Somewhere, somehow, they need to find their Queenslandiness. And their biggest problem? New South Wales didn’t play all that well.

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