State of Origin Player Ratings: Game 1, 2025

I want to claw my eyes out

Queensland

1. Kalyn Poo-nga (they’re not all homers)
   
   Terrible. Not Origin standard. Being the best player at the Knights is like being the world’s tallest dwarf. Hammer should have played fullback, although I can see why considering the injury crisis I’ll outline in just a little bit. I said to myself in running that surely the Maroons had someone else they could have selected at fullback, but I realised that they didn’t. Every single Queenslander has some sort of ailment. Other than being a Queenslander, I mean.
   
   Ponga’s attacking repertoire, which on his day is the best in the game, was reduced to picking someone big to run into or, failing that, falling over. Came out of the line once for a very good read and credit where due, it was noteworthy. But other than that looked largely like he couldn’t be arsed.
   
   To the casual observer it may have looked like he had a good fullback’s game in that he calmly collected every kick on the full but in all honesty that was simply down to the fact that the NSW halfback is the world’s most overrated fuckknuckle and couldn’t have picked Ponga out any better with a predator drone. There were several times that Ponga didn’t even move, Cleary found him with the kind of precision that DARPA would pay handsomely for.
   
   I’ve always been of the opinion that Ponga’s headgear contains a very large magnet and the fact that he was collected high yet again has not dissuaded me.

2. Tank
   He looks like Tank from the Matrix doesn’t he? I don’t really have notes here, he was fine. Which instantly makes him better than pretty much anyone who has played Origin in the last 20 years. I hate it when people play well, it’s boring.

You might be tempted to say that he had a good game, but being better in the air than Brian To’o is the greatest mismatch in aviation since Saddam Hussein’s air force was destroyed in the first 20 minutes of the Gulf War. Xavier Coates is 3.6 roentgen - not great, not terrible.

3. Robert? Toia?

It was always a bold gambit by supercoach Billy Slater to offer a starting centre position to a guy he met in a Caxton St pub on Tuesday night but I don’t fault innovation. It’s important to try things and the first one to break through the wall gets bloody.

In all seriousness, this does nothing to disabuse me of the notion that the number one selection criterion for State of Origin is to play for the Roosters, no matter how shit the Roosters are playing in general.

(Note to rugby league media: the singular of criteria is criterion. No, not Crichton, criterion. We’re going to need to learn declension eventually, but I’m also aware we haven’t passed year 8 physics yet.)

In fairness Reagan, no? Ryan? No, no I’ve got this. Richard…sorry Robert (checks notes) Toia didn’t have a terrible game, but that was mostly down to the fact that Trell had a fucking shocker by Trell’s standards. You could have easily substituted Rhianna Tron with a cardboard cutout of Jason Statham and had exactly the same impact.

4. Ham&Cheese Tabula Rasa

Hey Hammer (don’t hurt ‘em) you know how you’re the best fullback on the park? Yeah, we’re going to need you to play centre against someone who is defensively strong enough to completely neutralise your strengths. Best of luck.

I bestow on the Hammer the greatest award I can give in a SoO - not your fault.

5. Francis of Assissi Holmes
   A victim of the Flanagan Polish. You really cannot overstate Shane Flanagan’s ability to take one of the best players into the comp and turn him into a gibbering imbecile. He’s a reverse Craig Bellamy.
   
   I really thought that Holmes was in for a big one, considering he was back in Queensland and could get a haircut from his local supplier, who uses a hadron collider to get that Planck Length fade, but it just made him play worse.

Utterly shameful defensive play leading to the first try. More shameful defence leading to more tries. Imagine letting that Lomax idiot outplay you? If Holmes doesn’t commit sudoku out of shame he has no honour.

6. Eddie Munster

Cam can be the best player in the competition on his day. The issue is that his performance is based entirely on the dosage and purity of the cocaine he has been consuming in the leadup to the match. If he’s getting 95% pure Columbian he can score 9 tries, kick 20 goals, and tackle the other team into oblivion.

Unfortunately, Border Force seem to be doing a good job lately and Cam has been forced to subsist on an equal parts mixture of ground-up Argine and Whizz-Fizz and he hasn’t been able to carry Queensland in his usual fashion.

Another side-effect of the podcast powder is that it makes one immune to the opinion of others, and if Munsts was on the good gear he wouldn’t have given a shit what a dickhead like Liam Martin thought of him.

7. Daily Cherry-Kool Aid

Every year we have to sadly anoint another champion of the game with the unfortunate sobriquet of “too old, too slow, too stupid”. This annum the heavy head wearing the crown is that of DCE.

It’s not that he played poorly, very far from it. Of the players wearing the number 7 he was clearly superior. His kicks found grass and he managed a couple of sneaky linebreaks. At club level this would be considered a fine performance. However, Origin is a different beast. There is a seminal moment approaching here. As the Bushido code states, and in serendipitous fashion, a samurai is like a cherry blossom. He should cast himself from the tree at the height of his powers, rather than wither on the branch.

What am I saying? I’m being daft. DCE had a brilliant game, he was incredible, man of the match even. Eastern Suburbs absolutely should spend nearly a million dollars a year on a 37 year-old halfback, they’ll win so many premierships. They should move immediately on this.

8. Password 2

Big Mo comes from a team anchoring the bottom of the table. However, every Queensland team needs to be represented under DEI regulations so you have to select a couple of Uncle Des’ Country Style Fruitcakes™

Fotuaika has a reputation at club level of attracting penalties like chum and luckily for the Blues these skills are transferable. I’m genuinely not certain that Fotuaika knows the rules regarding offside or, indeed, is able to count to ten.

However it broke down, his inability to retreat to the place where the referee was standing and yelling at him gave NSW roughly eight trillion extra tackles on the Queensland tryline and eventually even the 17 blind squirrels that Daley picked are going to find 4 nuts.

9. Harry Styles

One Direction is the best hooker in the game. That’s an objective fact. He demonstrated this again tonight, but there is such a thing as trying too hard.

The incredibly highly caffeinated Harry saw the rest of his team getting rolled and he took on the Sisyphean task of carrying the entire state of Queensland up that hill only to watch them continually roll down again. As the game progressed Grant devolved into dog shot penalties, probably in the misguided assumption that the game’s laws would apply equally to both teams. I don’t know what could have possibly given him this idea, but it didn’t work out for him.

10. Password 1

The Big Country once again brought all of the haircuts to the grandest stage of them all. People unfamiliar with the game might be thinking that Tino has a unique or noteworthy haircut, that isn’t what I’m saying. In defiance of Euclidean geometry and God’s will, Tino somehow manages to have every possible haircut at the same time. A scientifically unique superposition of every conceivable haircut a human can have. Only someone like John Forbes Nash could unravel the scientific secrets of the Big Country’s bouffant.

Unusually, although Tino plays for the Tits, he is not one of Uncle Des’ Country Style Fruitcakes™. He’s actually quite good and one of the few forwards on the field that actually knew how to play rugby league.

11. Doc At The Radar Station

Three times a year the collective subconscious psychic gestalt of everyone north of the Tweed congeals to manifest someone who personifies the ideals of the Maroons. This will be an outrageously weird looking guy with an awful haircut who plays rugby league with no regard for his own personal safety.

Like a vampire he has had many names over the millennia - Martin Lang, Nate Myles, David Stagg, Ogedai Khan, Sennacherib - and now he takes the form of Reuben Cotter. Does he actually exist? Or do we all simply assume someone like this *must* exist? It’s the Mandela Effect.

12. Jeremiah Obediah Zachariah Jeremiah Nanai

DEI again. There must be a minimum quota of North Queensland Cowboys chosen or else General Zod will get angry and imprison everyone in the phantom zone. Nanai has never proven himself at Origin level and his form in club land is on even shakier ground. He was dropped earlier in the year from a team that was on the bottom of the table. But sure, chuck him in Origin and see what happens. What happened was he got outplayed by Anus Crichton, which I didn’t think was possible until I saw it with my own eyes.

How this clown is playing ahead of Jai Arrow is something that needs to be explored by a Royal Commission.

13. Prettyboy Carrigan
    Patty has clearly been caught up in the hype of the new Doom game because from kickoff his entire game plan was RIP AND TEAR. It’s against the rules of the sport to grab a man’s head and attempt to rip it off his shoulders, and he was penalised for it a few times, but I can’t help but admire the passion. He saw Liam Martin and attempted to remove him from the gene pool, which is a laudable civil service and we need to invent some kind of medal for it.
    
    Carrigan has been one of the game’s premiere locks for a number of years, this much is fact. However, as the game is evidently moving towards smaller, more mobile forward packs, Carrigan has decided to go in the opposite direction and bulk up, severely limiting his usefulness in the modern game. It’s a bold move Cotton, let’s see how it plays out.

14. Tom Dearden

There’s no way that Tom Dearden doesn’t look like a kid who’s putting on his dad’s Maroon jumper. He’s just oddly proportioned. Every school in Australia has someone that they reckon played the Milky Bar Kid, I guarantee that Tom was his school’s version.

Dearden is one of those guys who is kinda ‘meh’ at club level but by the power of Billy Moore he turns from the timid Prince Adam into He-Man at the Cauldron. By the time he finally came onto the field the game was too far gone to rescue, but his injection came with an immediate improvement in Queensland’s performance.

There is no doubt that he should be the halfback ahead of Methuselah, but people seem to have this weird idea about loyalty. I don’t get it and I never have. Do you keep paying $2 for petrol just because your local service station used to have decent prices once upon a time? Fuck no, because that would be dumb. So why do we think we should keep underperforming players just because they did a good thing once?

15. Wish.com Peacemaker

There’s no better example of people who grow an extra leg playing for Queensland than Lindsay Collins. A guy who is generally a lumbering idiot at club level turns into an absolute superstar when he gets away from Trent Robinson’s 648 page manual for How-To-Play-Rugbaleeg-Good-And-Maybe-Do-Other-Things-Good-Too.

Unfortunately, much like Dearden, Collins was on the bench and not starting the game. So he came on after the handicap of Big Mo’s presence and his patented penalty a minute playstyle and there’s only so much even a superhero can do.

16. Beau Fermor

Another of Uncle Des’ Country Style Fruitcakes™. He doesn’t get a nickname because to get a nickname you have to do something. Amazingly, the guy who doesn’t do anything of note at club level didn’t do anything of note at Origin level.

Slater was obviously hoping for a Collins-like effect of drinking a XXXX and having a Popeye-level transformation, but you can’t just hand a nasty beer to a random fuckwit and expect fireworks. You’re supposed to spend a few weeks giving nasty beers to the entire population of Queensland and seeing who turns into the second coming of Choppy Close, you can’t just hope for the best. You need to put in the spadework Billy. Arthur didn’t just pull a sword out of a stone, the king had an entire tournament, read your Malory.

17. Trent Loeiro

He’s been 18th man for a number of years and I keep saying that I have no idea who he is. He finally played last night, ahead of the aforementioned good player Jai Arrow, and you know what? I still do not have the faintest fucking idea who this guy is.

Admittedly, I was absolutely tanked by the time he came on the field, because there’s no way that I can possibly watch this slop sobre, but Trent? Trent? Really? Trent obviously did nothing of note.

NSW

1. Dylan Thomas
   I’ll outline this here and it applies at several places, because everyone from Penrith can have an identical rating.
   
   From time to time you’ll see the Rugby League Media Brainstrust talking about Moneyball. They’ll talk about a team, usually a struggling team, who is trying to ‘moneyball’ their way into the top eight. And this demonstrates that they have never read Moneyball. Actually, I’d be surprised if Paul Crawley could read anything more advanced than Cat in the Hat, but I digress.

Moneyball, actual moneyball, has existed in the sport for years and it’s been very successful. They’re called Penrith. Because if you actually read Moneyball (it’s one of my favourite books) instead of just the blurb you would know that sabermetrics isn’t about finding players who are cheap, it’s the philosophy that if the established wisdom of an institution goes unchecked for long enough then it can blind itself to successful ideas simply because they exist outside of the established milieu.

(Milieu: n - the physical and social setting in which something occurs and develops, just in case Paul Crawley is ‘reading’ this.)

For instance, what are the traditional criteria for a winger in rugby league? A winger should be tall, fast, good in the air, and most importantly - able to score tries. Brian To’o has absolutely none of these qualities.

But he’s busy and he likes running headfirst into people who want to hurt him, and Ivan Cleary has, correctly, identified that these metres at the beginning of a set are more valuable than the 12-odd points he concedes or fails to score in a game.

Every single player in Penrith is some variant of this. They are all significantly better as a cohesive unit than each of the constituent parts. That’s why there are very, very few players who leave this system who enjoy any kind of success at another club.

Apply this to every Penrith player. First up, Dylan Edwards.

Dylan Edwards is…fine. Just fine. Like all of them. He isn’t a bad fullback, he’ll never put in a bad performance. On his day he is even a good fullback.

However, he is not the best fullback in the game, he wasn’t the best fullback in this game, and he was at least the third best fullback in the Blues side that took the field tonight.

How were his metres? Fine. How was his defense? Fine. How was he under the high ball? Fine..ish. He dropped a couple of sitters.

In attack he was…fine.

Had a try assist with a basic wrap-around after 5 consecutive sets given by Klein and acted like he was the second coming of Clive Churchill. Then he scored a try of his own after yet another period where Ash Klein decided that the Blues should be given ten entire minutes to score a try, and even then it wasn’t some piece of brilliance on Edwards’ part, the entire thing was a swiss-cheese of accidents that culminated in him falling over the line like Stephen Bradbury.

It’s worth noting that Ryan Papenhuyzen was available. The amount of people who incorrectly assume that Paps is a Queenslander because he’s never been picked for NSW tells you a lot about NSW.

2. Brian Demaciado
   HE IS NOT AN ORIGIN LEVEL WINGER. HE. IS. NOT. A. FIRST. GRADE. WINGER. What an absolute fuckwit.
   He genuinely would not play first grade at any other club and still, STILL, people talk like he’s the best winger in the game. If we were holding a party for the best wingers in the competition, he wouldn’t be allowed in the same suburb.
   
   To’o doesn’t have the first fucking idea what to do when a ball is kicked towards him. I honestly think he must have nightmares in which the opposition sends the ball anywhere in his general direction. (There’s a very niche Moneyball reference there.)
   
   People talk about the metres he makes, but none of them are post-contact. He merely repeatedly closes the distance between where he gets the ball and when someone hits him like a freight train. Anyone reading this would be able to do exactly the same, because it doesn’t take any skill or effort.
   
   Did he score? Did the pass come directly from Trell? How many tries has he scored without Trell present? What’s that? One? Is that all? Wow, he’s not very good at this is he.

3. Good Crichton
   Crichton isn’t the best player in the competition, despite what ‘Gus’ would tell you, but he isn’t far off. He’s top three, for sure. And he was certainly the best player in this game.
   
   Kept Hammer quiet, which is just about the hardest thing to do in the entire sport. If Critta didn’t play NSW do not win that game. I will brook no dissent on that. It’s a statement of fact. If anyone else were in that position, NSW would lose. And if they went with that Graham imbecile instead, the Hammer would have broken all kinds of records.
   
   People don’t fully appreciate the injury crisis at Souths. They have one (1) outside back in reserve, Fletcher Meyers. Even so, I would strongly advocate playing any of Souths forwards in the centres ahead of Campbell Graham.
   

4. Trellevision
   Dropped a ball for a try, which is more karma’s fault than Trell’s. Once again provided the gentle coaching and ludicrously skillful pass required to get a rank idiot like Brian To’o over the tryline, something for which he has no personal capacity to achieve. See the above stat about how he never scores without Trell.
   
   Trell’s defense was actually pretty good, he shut down a couple of raids that threatened to bring Queensland back into the game, but because it’s fashionable to hate the outspoken black man you won’t hear about it.
   
   I do admit that it was an incredibly lazy game by Mitchell, he certainly didn’t do enough to work up a sweat, but I am unphased by this. I’ve gone on record numerous times in this masthead that I don’t want Trell playing this nonsense at all, he should be conserving himself for Souths, and this was the next best thing.
   
   I’m genuinely surprised that Latrell was selected at all, given that he was demonstrably the best player in the sport in the lead up to the match and how almost all of the other selections are an exercise in Poe’s Law but strange things do happen.

5. Zac Lorax
   His first act in the game was sooking for a penalty because he didn’t like being tackled. Verdict: weak gutter dog. There needs to be a referendum to constitutionally enshrine every Australian citizen’s duty to spit on Zac Lomax. Albo’s a Souths man, he’ll get on it, he’s got the mandate.
   
   In fairness, the Lorax did score two tries. He acted like he was somehow responsible for this, even though he was playing outside the aforementioned best player on the park Stephen Crichton, and Valentine Holmes had a shocker, and there was literally nobody in front of him when he received the ball, but once all that fell into place the three metre sprint to the line was all Zac Attacc baby!
   
   Replaced the phenomenally shit goalkicker Cleary late in the match and lowered the bar even further.

6. Mitchell Elias
   NSW best halfback option, single-handedly clawing the perennially struggling Eels from the bottom of the ladder. So naturally he has to play out of position to accommodate the most overrated player in the history of both codes of rugby. Given little opportunity to shine due to Captain Shitshake and the Hillybilly Buggerboys hogging all the ball, most of it was alright, some of it was terrible, but he had ever so slightly more impact on this game than I did.

7. Stan Smith
   HE. IS. NOT. AN. IMMORTAL. HE. IS. NOT. EVEN. A. GOOD. HALFBACK.
   
   I cannot be the only person who sees this. Every single thing he attempted turned to utter dogshit. Not only that, he has never, NEVER, stepped up at Origin level. Not once. Not a single time.
   
   He has four premierships that were brought upon by, in order: Adam Reynolds implosion, Clint Gutherson implosion, then a second, bigger Adam Reynolds implosion, and finally an entire Melbourne Storm implosion.
   
   I ask everyone reading this to honestly, honestly, ask themselves “have I ever said to myself ‘wow, it if weren’t for Nathan Cleary the Panthers wouldn’t have won that game?’ Has anyone ever said that?
   
   Because every week you can say that about Mitchell Moses or Kalyn Ponga or Stephen Crichton or Matt Burton or Latrell Mitchell or Jahrome Hughes or Ryan Papenhuyzen or James Fischer-Harris or Ethan Strange or Luke Metcalf or…anyone. But you never say it about Cleary.
   
   He’s usually fine, sometimes he’s even good, but he has never been great. I will admit though that he does have a very accurate general kicking game. I can’t think of a single time he didn’t find Ponga on the full. That’s a 100% strike rate.
   
   This was supposed to be the game where he silenced the haters (read: me) with an inspirational performance to put him in the same breath as Mortimer and Sterling and Johns and once again he was simply fucking hopeless outside of the Penrith system.
   
   Every time he lined up a kick I said in the running “I hope he doesn’t swing it too much because he hasn’t teed this kick up very well” and he kept going from bad to worse. It’s weird to think that I’m a better goalkicker than the NSW halfback. I’m not being hyperbolic, jump on Facey or Insta, you can see me in action.
   
   Nathan Cleary’s entire career has been like one of those global spells that Dr Strange casts and I can’t believe the universe hasn’t been torn apart by the disconnect between what everyone says about Cleary and what we see with our own eyes week in, week out.

8. Bitchell Marnett
   The Writs of Rugbaleeg dictate that you have to have one (1) player from the New Zealand Warriors to maintain relations with our closest eastern neighbour. Barnett was it. Was he good? I guess. He wasn’t terrible. Although no Blues forward was as good as the media hagiography after the game made them out to be. I can’t complain about his selection, it certainly wasn’t as egregious as about 14 of the others. A pass.

9. Goose Robson
   Apisai Koriosau is one of the best hookers of all time and put in one of the greatest individual games of recent memory just minutes before this team was announced, clearly showing that Daley named his team well before any football was actually played.
   
   Reece Robson isn’t the best New South Welshman who plays hooker, he’s quite possibly the worst, but he is the whitest, that’s how the team has always been picked and we’re not changing now.

10. Haas of Payne
    Fine, I guess. To read the post-match dispatches you’d think he was Ian Roberts, charging endlessly into the fray, breaking the line, scoring tries, putting Queenslanders on their backs for 80 minutes. In reality he did…fine.
    
    That seems to be the best that any Blue can possibly hope for. He didn’t do anything outright amazing, but he also didn’t do anything as stupid as any of the other window-lickers in this forward pack. So there we are. The Overton Window has firmly shifted towards mediocrity.

11. Liam Martin
    Categorically the dumbest motherfucker ever to play the game. Thinks that talent and criminal thuggery are somehow equivalent.
    
    Everyone talks about his aggression and how he takes it to Queensland, but have you ever seen Liam mixing it in the middle of the field? No, he stays away from anywhere he isn’t the biggest bully.
    
    The pre-game talk was all about his feud with Cameron Munster. Is Munster the biggest forward Queensland have, someone who Martin wants to chop down and establish dominance over in a clash of the titans? No, Munster is a fucking half.
    
    Liam Martin is a schoolyard bully with a sub-zero IQ and he doesn’t have the cognitive capacity to consciously recognise just how fortunate he is that the sport of Rugby League exists, because without it his only possible career paths would have been sucking loose coins out of train station vending machines or being arrested for bank robbery because he thought that spraying his face with lemon juice would turn him invisible.

12. Bad Crichton
    Bullied an on-debut, ten-games-into-his-career, outside back for 80 minutes. Oh, everyone be quiet, we got a genuine badass over here.
    
    This nincompoop is Liam Martin 2.0 with a worse haircut and less fingers.
    
    The amount of time he spent with his face pressed against a Queenlander’s was starting to look like the world’s gayest porno, Anus Chrichton in ‘8 Guys Blowing 9 Guys.’
    
    Occasionally got lost and found himself in the middle of the field before he freaked out and went back to the nice, safe tramlines where he won’t find anyone bigger than him.
    
    It’s beyond a farce that he’s in this side ahead of Keaon Kolomatangi.

    
    Koloamatangi, who was almost man of the match in his only Origin appearance, played prop and had 3 consecutive weeks of +200 run metre games, culminating in a staggering 330m against the Tigers moments before the teams were announced. He’s currently a prop, he plays better at lock, his default position is back row, and he’s a starting international hooker.
    
    Still, apparently not enough of a utility for Supercoach Daley.

13. Isaah Yeo (every year I have to re-write it after the spellcheck automatically changes it to “Isaiah”, because obviously nobody would spell their name like that.)
    Took the Tandy. Never take the Tandy.
    
    I’m just going to keep cutting and pasting this, because if he’s not going to do anything different then neither am I:
    “I’m really sick of the media trying to gaslight me into thinking that this grain silo filled with rancid spam is actually a good player. He’s not. He’s just…not. I can’t do it anymore.
    
    They tell me that he’s doing great things and he’s one of the best players in the competition and he’s the best lock in the game. That’s the audio coming through.
    
    And you watch what’s on screen and he’s lumbering around like bigfoot.
    
    Everything he does is so slow that you can watch empires rise and fall in the time it takes him to play the ball. He offers no penetration, he averages about 8 metres a hitup, and I’ve never, ever seen him offer anything in attack.
    
    Actually it’s the opposite, so many attacking opportunities go to waste because Yeo gets the ball and he decides to stop and have a sit down because his brain can’t process the arcane and complicated Rubric of Ivan in real time and he needs to have a rest.”

    
    Is nobody going to wonder why I could have so accurately assessed Yeo’s performance a year before he played this game?

14. Connor Watson
    No nicknames for useless wankers.
    
    Came onto the field, immediately whinged and then dropped the ball. Impact, that’s what Supercoach Daley wants to see.
    
    He’s the new car horn. Does nothing for the performance of the car other than make noise.
    
    Looks like they found him hanging around the car park of a Punchbowl Red Rooster at 3am, plays like it too.
    
    Technically had a try assist when his singular capacity for dropping the ball rolled double zero and it found an equally fortuitous Dylan Edwards.
    

15. Spencer - really? Spencer? - Leniu
    I genuinely believe that selectors thought they were picking Terell May and couldn’t tell them apart. I’m not doing a bit, I will testify to that under oath.
    
    Bad luck for the most in-form prop in the competition, but a stroke of luck for the less-than-competent Spencer Tracey. There’s a possibility he played well, I don’t know, I was entranced by what is objectively the worst neck tattoo in the history of humanity.

16. Hudson Young
    Have you actually watched a Raiders game this year? I’m not trying to put anyone on the spot and only a sick mind would actually sit down and watch the Raiders, but there’s a chance someone has.
    
    If you’re normal and you don’t watch the Green Machine, from their position on the ladder you might assume they were playing well. They are not.
    
    They are a team of astonishingly unhinged lunatics in a 17-way shootout to see who can give away the dumbest penalty on every play. It’s like Ricky has a prize pool going and whoever ends the year with the most absurd penalty conceded wins a meat tray.
    
    Hudson Young isn’t the dumbest alopecian ape in the Canberra stable, but he is the one that was born in NSW. Ricky being Ricky, he has a lot of incriminating evidence on his former Raiders teammates like Madge and Bellamy and Daley, all three NSW coaches, and he will release it if his Frankenstein isn’t allowed to come onto the field and cause mayhem for at least 10 minus.

17. Max King
    I have no idea who this is. This continues the now time-honoured NSW tradition of reserving the No 17 jumper for someone who won third prize in a raffle.
    
    I assumed he was a Rooster since that’s the only selection rubric that matters, but apparently the Phil-Tippett-cheese-nightmare that is Phil Gould still has enough of a fell hold over the selection board that he can ram through a couple of his own stable.
    

18. Ash Klein (c)
    10/10, got NSW on the front foot early and never released the pressure.
    
    Easily the best player on the field, not even close.
    
    The penalty count at half time was 6-2 and one of those was awarded by the bunker. Which is atrocious.
    
    Every time NSW’ complete deadshit of a halfback couldn’t figure out which way the tryline was Klein found a new interpretation of six-again.
    
    I’ve never seen such one-sided refereeing in an Origin match and I’m old enough to have seen the Grasshopper.