Rugby league doesn’t have many worse spots to be than the wrong end of a State of Origin dead rubber.
Such is the magnitude and emotion of coverage around the interstate series that down 2-0 and playing for pride is an exceptionally lonely place.
Origin is about passion and pride and deep, true feelings that makes winning feel even better but the other side of that coin is it makes losing feel all the worse.
The fans, who were so engaged and full of life just a few weeks ago, check out.
They’re already back to thinking about their clubs and the premiership and they’re hurt at being 2-0 down, so their mood switches between irritation at their clubs losing a player and outright sneering at the latest selection blunder their state has made before collapsing into apathy like a beaten dog.
What does it matter anyway, they say to each other as their shoulders slump. It’s already over. We’ve already lost.
This time, it’s the Blues who are feeling the brunt of it. After two morale-sapping losses, New South Wales have to win their people back over.
But even Queensland aren’t immune — the last time they were in the Blues position of playing a dead rubber at home, they got booed.
New South Wales might cop similar treatment next Wednesday night when their new-look side runs out at Stadium Australia. The crowd will be bitter and it will be smaller than usual.
A dead rubber is a harder sell because, outside the truest believers, it’s more difficult to convince a jaded fanbase that a game matters as much when nothing but pride is on the line.
But pride’s not nothing and this game does matter. Even if they don’t all matter the same amount, every Origin matters and not in the hackneyed, never-give-up, motivational poster sense.
The battle between New South Wales and Queensland is done for the year but each series is only one part of the story and this story has no end.
No matter how far down a team might be, and the Blues are so far down you’d forgive them for forgetting what light looks like, the rise back to the top has to start somewhere.
The climb out of hell has to start somewhere and what happens after what happens next can depend on what happens now.
The Maroons understand this well. They know this game is where new heroes can be found and old ones can be redeemed.
In the last dead-rubber, back in the long-forgotten days of 2021, they were in as crook a position as their southern rivals are in right now.
Those booes at Skilled Park were justified after the Queenslanders lost the opening two matches by a combined score of 76-6.
That night they fought off a whitewash with a 18-12 victory and in doing so they found some pieces of the future. They gave debuts to Tom Flegler, who played in both victorious matches this series, and Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow, who is well on his way to becoming the state’s latest prolific tryscorer.
And a dead rubber can be about more than throwing in kids and hoping for the best. That same night in 2021 was when Ben Hunt started at hooker for Queensland again after two seasons as bench utility. He scored two tries, won man of the match and began his transformation into the Dozer of Queensland legend.
It was a similar story for Daly Cherry-Evans in the previous dead-rubber in 2018. The Manly playmaker hadn’t played Origin in three years and had a reputation for underperforming in the game’s toughest arena.
Cherry-Evans didn’t win man of the match in Queensland’s 18-12 victory, but he went close. For the next series, he was captain and now, five years later with three series wins to his name, it looks like he’s going to stay that way as long as he wants.
It’s tempting to look at Billy Slater’s side, who are warmly favoured to claim the first clean sweep since 2010, and think of it happening overnight when the Melbourne legend came in with the magic touch last year and reminded Queensland of all the things that make the Maroon jersey special.
But real life doesn’t happen that way. Slater’s fine work hasn’t just been in creating something new, it’s also been in maximising what he already had to work with.
In Hunt and Cherry-Evans and Tabuai-Fidow and Flegler he had treasures that were recovered from the wreckage and fixed up new again.
Now Queensland are riding high again and cranking up Powderfinger as loud as the speaker goes and telling each other that New South Wales really don’t get Origin, it’s easy to forget how some of it started.
The Maroons are on top again and could be there for a while and it took bold selection calls and new blood and a fresh approach and the Queensland spirit and everything else, but they also had to find something in the ashes of series that were lost and lost badly. They had to forge a couple of diamonds from desperate hope.
The Blues haven’t had to look for something like that in a long time. They haven’t got on the wrong side of a dead rubber in seven years and one of the state’s great weaknesses when it comes to Origin footy is a tendency to forget the past.
That dead rubber back in 2016 was on the back of a similar series to this one. The Blues were at a low ebb. They looked lost and they played like it.
They needed some changes in the dead rubber, some hope to spring eternal, and they found it when they handed James Tedesco his Origin debut.
Tedesco was superb that night in a last-second Blues victory and it kicked off a glorious Origin career. As strong as he was on debut, few would have predicted he would go on to be the state’s most-capped fullback or the best Blues player since Andrew Johns.
So much has happened since then, but the story began in a dead rubber and that’s worth remembering.
It could very well end in similar circumstances. There are plenty of Blues fans who have called for Tedesco’s head in a loud and vicious fashion.
He has won this spot out of respect for the past rather than planning for the future but he is one of the few to have earned that right.
It’s a strange looking team. There are big changes and there had to be, because when a team loses someone has to pay the price.
Bradman Best is as big a bolter as Tabuai-Fidow was two years ago. Keaon Koloamatangi has been on the edge of Origin for a while but has not been playing great football for South Sydney.
Jacob Saifiti and Clint Gutherson on the bench are not as electrifying as Spencer Leniu and Scott Drinkwater might have been.
Nicho Hynes is very unfortunate not to be starting at five-eighth but Cody Walker’s inclusion is promising.
He might be 33, but he’s still up to this level and as Cherry-Evans proved, the future doesn’t have to belong to the young if you don’t let them take it off you.
Queensland, settled and secure with AJ Brimson returning, Corey Horsburgh debuting and Hunt and Harry Grant swapping positions, are deserved favourites.
Their motivation is far more clear because they never, ever get tired of winning. They’d win a series 4-0 if they could and they could do it for a 100 years and lap it up every time.
The only thing they love more than knocking the Blues down is letting them back up so they can knock them down again.
Given how badly things are going for the Blues, Slater’s side could well become the fifth Maroons team ever to run the table against the Blues.
If that happens it will be an embarrassment for New South Wales and the bloodletting will continue.
The jeers will get louder, the reaction more brutal and whoever replaces Fittler will have a job on their hands in reuniting the team with a disconnected fan base.
But come next year, we’ll do it all again. This is not a straight line with an ending, it’s a circle that goes around and around.
Even Queensland, who once won eight in a row, can’t win forever. They have built their future from the past and now New South Wales must rise to that same challenge.
There’s a fair chance plenty of the Blues are playing for a sunrise they’ll never see. But they still have to play for it.
This is a hard life but someone has to live it and this game still has to matter to them. If it doesn’t, Queensland have already won tomorrow as surely as they’ve won today.
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