If you don’t bend, you break. For 65 minutes, Queensland didn’t bend.
Then, after an eternity stretching back 19 years plus those 65 minutes, Jarome Luai and Mitchell Moses broke them. Two playmakers who had been maligned, to put it politely, on both sides of the border, defeated doubt itself.
Luai cracked the Maroon wall with his speed to put Bradman Best away. Moments later, Moses parted the middle defence and Queensland came apart like a windscreen.
And that was that. As they had in 1994 and 2005, NSW won a State of Origin decider in Brisbane. Luai and Moses were not the only ones to silence the hate. Michael Maguire, that careworn grizzled debutant, can bring back the trophy that has eluded a generation of coaches. He won’t bother waiting for the apologies; he wouldn’t have time to read them all.
Luai and Moses put on the only tries of the game. Maguire masterminded the campaign. It’s unfair to single out individuals because all 17 Blues players made a contribution and so did Haumole Olakau’atu, who was watching from the seats.
It was that kind of night. Most of the time it was hard to tell if this was an Origin decider or something a bit rougher like a Republican Party convention. The schoolyard chant was on – “Fight! Fight! Fight!” – and Lang Park was soon looking like one of those popular combat sports videos where the two contestants knock each other out and everyone goes home. Except a draw was not an option and nobody was allowed to leave.
NSW celebrate their series win.Credit: Getty Images
In the pre-match froth, a lot was made of the importance of the opening exchanges, which, supposedly, would set the tone and determine the result.
Payne Haas and NSW won the first collisions, and only a Daly Cherry-Evans ankle tap stopped Best from scoring in the first minute. So maybe NSW did gain the advantage. But it soon became clear that the traditional softening-up period, as the late David Morrow might have called it, kept going, going, going, and remarkably neither team was gone. Half an hour had passed and we were still in the traditional softening-up period, still in the opening earthquake, and it was still nil-all.