When State of Origin is doing its bit to warm up the rugby league winter, the promoters froth about it being the game’s biggest contest.
With respect, crap. The Grand Final is it. Was, is, will be. The choice doesn’t have to be one or the other, but if there’s a preference, I’m for The One.
How can this be claimed when more fans have a direct emotional investment in the Blues and/or the Maroons, and it gets higher TV ratings? How, when most spectators aren’t going to live or die on the result, can the grand final have any claim on being league’s One Big One?
Well, maybe that’s part of its secret: the great majority don’t really mind. They might love or hate Penrith and Melbourne equally. They become Penrith/Melbourne fanatics for 80 minutes only. They might switch preferences just before the kick-off or even during the game. The motivating passion for a grand final is, compared with a regular-season round, pretty superficial.
You’d like to see the Panthers brought down a notch. You’d like to see the Storm brought down a bigger notch. You love Nathan Cleary. Or no, Ryan Papenhuyzen. You hate Cameron Munster. Or no, Jarome Luai.
Compared with watching your own team, these are paltry emotions, but that’s why the Grand Final is spelt with capital letters. For most, it’s low-stress viewing. It’s fun. Look at your knuckles: they haven’t turned white.
Nathan Cleary and Harry Grant pose with the Provan-Summons Trophy.Credit: Getty Images
It’s also a lot more memorable. In Origin, every year claims to have been the best ever, but how many games do you really remember? How many are just a blue-and-maroon blur? Can you run off, year-by-year, who has won Origin series and how you can tell one from the others?
By contrast, I doubt I’m the only rugby league nutjob who can name every grand final winner (and loser) since I was six. If you want to be really, really bored, I could give a thumbnail of each one. Somehow, I don’t think I’m alone.
There are other reasons to value a Grand Final more than a representative game. As in most football codes, club games are higher quality. You might get the game’s best 26 players on the field for a New Zealand-Australia Test, but do they ever live up to the on-paper promise?
A Grand Final brings together teammates who live in each other’s pockets, who anticipate each other’s movements, who synchronise instinctively. The Penrith team of the past four years is far better than the NSW Origin team when it was stacked with Panthers.
‘Not to knock Origin, but unless you’re a Queenslander it can never mean as much as your club winning a Grand Final.’
Compared to club teams, representative sides are always less than the sum of their parts. (What do you think is higher quality, a good FIFA World Cup match or a good English Premier League match?) Another reason the Grand Final is the best league game is that it’s the culmination of a long campaign. Origin has only temporary endings. There is, literally, always next year. For Grand Final clubs, the road here was full of lucky and unlucky twists and freak occurrences that may not come around again.
Much is said about the entrenchment of clubs like Penrith and Melbourne at the top of the NRL, but has Craig Bellamy ever looked remotely like a guy who knows his team is going to make yet another Grand Final?
Penrith’s recurrent Grand Finals may have an air of inevitability, but the salary cap has tried to hobble them. Since 2021, Penrith have waved off premiership players Viliame Kikau, Stephen Crichton, Matt Burton, Api Koroisau, Charlie Staines, Luke Capewell, Tevita Pangai, Tyrone and Taylan May, Spencer Leniu, Paul Momirovski, Jaeman Salmon, Jack Cogger and Tyrone Peachey. That’s pretty much a whole Grand Final team.
Next year, add Luai, Sunia Turuva and their cornerstone, James Fisher-Harris. Their five-year reign isn’t proof that the salary cap doesn’t work; it shows that a club can be good enough to overcome it, and if you can’t love that, you have to admire it.
Credit: Simon Letch
Yes, it did always look like Penrith and Melbourne this year, but there is something to celebrate in excellence. It makes a change from every other week, where the typical fan finds false hope in a last-play comeback, ecstasy in a fluke win on a blustery June afternoon, and pure misery from giving up a big lead on a cold night at Homebush.
Most league fans experience their strongest emotions in that weekly tumult. On Grand Final night, by contrast, we can see rugby league elevated to its best. The way the Broncos played for much of last year’s decider, the way Penrith played for the rest – what a refreshing change from watching your own club.
Not to knock Origin, but unless you’re a Queenslander it can never mean as much to you as your club winning a Grand Final. Origin is a recent confection that draws in the rugby league tourist. The Grand Final attracts fewer tourists, more purists. The final reason the Grand Final is so grand is that it’s final.
We can have a break now. A break from the bunker, a break from the obstruction rule, a break from concussion protocols, a break from expert panels and their poor attempts at disguising their grudges and conflicts, a break from bad blood, a break from betting ads, a break from ACLs, MCLs and PCLs, a break from the soap opera, a break from roadside drug tests (but not a break from Bali), a break from irritating commentators (but sadly, also a break from the joy of Andrew Voss), a break from subluxed shoulders, syndesmosis and other learnings that should be left to medical students, a break from touch judges being 10 metres inside the sideline (why? why?), a break for Joey Johns from things that terrify him, a break from NRL- versus-AFL (again, why?), a break from white powders that are not illicit substances, a break from salary sombreros, a break from “league powerbrokers”, a break from a co-dependent relationship we’ve been in since Las Vegas.
Unlike Origin, the Grand Final is a release. We can give all those pertinent rugby league matters an off-season, so that by late summer we’ll have something in life to look forward to again.
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