OPINION: "The Sad Demise of State of Origin Football in the post-West Coast Era", by Jack Frost, 25 August 2012.

This is the 1983 WA state team (picture courtesy: Lost WAFL Facebook Group). Football fans from the 1980s remember the packed houses for Tuesday afternoon State of Origin games at Subiaco Oval. It was a tradition to skip work or school for this event and no-one really minded. Sadly, the crowds fell after West Coast entered the VFL/AFL for some unknown reason and later the concept was cancelled.

The sad demise of State of Origin football

Of course, West Coast was always a football club and never a state team. You could see this in West Coast’s first ever VFL home-and-away game against Richmond, on 29 March 1987, which the author watched from the still extant concrete terracing on the scoreboard wing. Western Australians Michael Mitchell and Peter Wilson were playing in Richmond colours that day so how could West Coast be a state team? Such a hypothesis just made no logical sense. The author has always supported his state, Western Australia, in interstate and State of Origin games. Western Australian football fans did not seem to have the logical capacity to understand that West Coast was a club team and so attendances dropped off dramatically at State of Origin games, post-West Coast, as most Western Australians thought that these games had now become redundant. Barker (2004, p. 235) comments that: “[Ross] Glendinning knew that public fervour aroused by the State of Origin concept had now shifted to the VFL club side he captained”.

This situation is unlike in Queensland where State of Origin rugby-league games between Queensland and New South Wales are more popular now than ever despite the fact that three Queensland-based clubs play each week in the Sydney-based NRL. For many Queensland pubs, the three State of Origin nights each season are amongst their biggest nights of the year for crowds and beer sales. The author was at a small pub on the beach-front in Emu Park, 21 kilometres south of Yeppoon and 45 kilometres east of Rockhampton, for a State of Origin night in 2010 with his good friend Chris T. Although Emu Park is a small town (population 2,967 at the 2006 Census), the pub was packed with people in New South Wales and Queensland State of Origin replica playing jerseys and colours one hour before the kick-off. Fans of the two states were separated into different parts of the pub with, of course, the New South Wales section being the smaller. Tickets were being sold for a raffle which would give the winner and her/his friends a lounge sofa, located directly under the TV, to watch the game from and free food and drinks throughout the telecast. Even as early as one hour before the kick-off, insults were being exchanged across the bar with a Queensland fan shouting to the New South Wales section: “if you don’t like it here go home” and a New South Wales supporter replying promptly: “I’m going home tomorrow”.

The key point that the author is making here is that people in Queensland understand that the Brisbane Broncos, Gold Coast Titans, and North Queensland Cowboys are club teams and only the Queensland origin team is a legitimate state team. Fans of rugby-league in Queensland support both club-based NRL fixtures and State of Origin games. People understand that these two experiences, club games and state games, are fundamentally different and never the twain shall meet. Rugby-league State of Origin Games (three per season) are held presently on Wednesday nights, to separate them from club fixtures, and to encourage a culture where people drift to the pubs after work to watch the games. It may be due to the remoteness of Western Australia that there seems to be this “either-or” mentality in relation to higher-level sport (the “we got the Eagles so we don’t need Origin football mentality”) rather than the “both-and” mentality of the eastern states (the “let’s watch them both, they each add something extra” mentality). When the author lived in Perth, he was disappointed that State of Origin games, post-West Coast, no longer held anywhere near the same attraction and glamour that they had held in the mid-1980s.

However, perhaps, this comparison between rugby-league and Australian Rules Football State of Origin games is somewhat unfair as New South Wales and Queensland border each other geographically and there is more natural movement of people between the two states than between Western Australia and Victoria. This creates a more natural rivalry, based on issues outside football, which the rugby-league state teams merely tap into and exploit rather than create. However, the Origin games then provide a channel and an outlet for, and arguably also strengthen, that pre-existing rivalry. After the Queensland floods of January 2011, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh gave a passionate speech proclaiming “we are Queenslanders” and referring to the indomitable fighting spirit of Queenslanders. The relevant section of Anna Bligh’s 13 January 2011 speech is reproduced here:

“As we weep for what we’ve lost. As we grieve for family and friends. As we contemplate the devastating loss and destruction all around us. As we confront the challenge of recovery, let’s remember who we are. We’re Queenslanders. We hold a special place in the heart of the nation. We’re the ones they breed tough, north of the border. We’re the ones they knock down, and we get up again” [cited in Harvey, 2011, p. 9].

The back page of The Courier-Mail on 8 April 2011 cited Queenslander Origin player Sam Thaiday and summarized his views in three succinct but not inaccurate bullet-points: Queenslanders (a) have more Origin passion; (b) are better people; and (c) don’t want to be Blues. The Sydney-born Thaiday’s actual statement was as follows:

“I think we play different footy in Queensland. We are a lot more passionate about it. We are all good blokes – and I think people can see that and see the difference. Even the New South Welshmen want to be Queenslanders.

As you can see – and it is no surprise – there is [sic] a lot of blokes that would rather play for Queensland. It is that passion we have for our rugby league here in Queensland” [cited in Dorries, 2011, p. 120].

In the same day’s sporting section in The Courier-Mail, the veteran Brisbane Broncos and Queensland Origin player Darren “Locky” Lockyer put forward his opinion that people who were born on one side of the border but played on the other side should be able to choose their Origin team based on the “passion” they felt for the respective teams. Lockyer says:

“Origin is about passion and pride and if you are not passionate about the team you are going to play for, then you probably shouldn’t be there.

It is pretty simple – they either feel like they are a Blue or a Maroon” [cited in Dorries and Jancetic, 2011, p. 115].

It was only the second week in April 2011 and clearly the first shots of the year in the rugby-league Origin war had already been fired in earnest through the media. In general terms, Queensland is perceived to be more “hick” and “provincial”, but also more “authentic” and “grounded”, compared to the sophisticated and multicultural New South Wales so there is a real “city-country” or “capital-provincial city” fault-line here similar to that between London and Manchester or between London and Portsmouth. Ever since the Bjelke-Petersen era in Queensland, in relation to which Melbourne band Skyhooks sang “I’ll get down to Coolangatta and I’m on my way” in the song “Over the Border”, Queensland has always been perceived as being different from the two mainland states to its south.

By contrast, the rivalry between Western Australia and Victoria was always more of a pure football-based rivalry based on the VFL’s poaching of Western Australian players. Many Western Australian football people felt that the issue or fault-line underpinning the football-based rivalry between Western Australia and Victoria had been resolved (or if not resolved then at least re-channelled) because of the formation of West Coast. This alleged resolution of this contradiction is implied in the West Coast club song which states that “our Eagles have come home”. The playing of State of Origin games on Tuesday afternoons in Perth, ordinary working-days, created a hype-factor in the mid-1980s, and the bubble had burst by 1989, since people will only be able to escape work and school commitments if there is some major community groundswell and sympathy for the match and for the people attending the match. A person cannot so easily skip a day's work or school for what the broader community perceives to be a minor match. The Tuesday afternoon time slot created additional hype around State of Origin games in Perth in the mid-1980s and this bubble eventually had to burst. However, the AFL football leadership must surely look at the financial and marketing success of the rugby-league State of Origin concept today and wish that they had re-invented Australian Rules Football Origin games rather than let them die which was, without doubt, the unimaginative course of least resistance. One wonders whether Andrew Demetriou really deserves his two-million dollar plus yearly salary when you look at the State of Origin debacle and you compare the now non-existent State of Origin series in Australian football with the mega-successful, annual rugby-league event [by Jack Frost, 25 August 2012].

2011 Foxtel Cup, Subiaco Oval, Port Adelaide Magpies versus Claremont, Saturday 16 July 2011.