State of Origin v Teams

This question was raised to sportsmouth by a friend and subsequently the following week was all over the papers, "what to do about the affect the absence of a teams origin stars has on their club teams"?

There have been a few different approaches over the years, but the NRL continues to come back to playing the game mid week, with the selected players not allowed to be involved in the club games preceeding an Origin match. This obviously affects some teams more then others i.e Melb. Storm & the BrisVegas Broncos provide 15 players between them for the next match, thus severely harming their chances of winning the club games that preceed the Origin matches. But does it really effect their finals chances, probably not as if they manage to win one of those games, then it's a bonus, it also gives them a chance to throw some young fringe first grade players into action to see how close they are to making a step up, its actually a tribute to those teams and their coaches that they continue to produce representative players at the rate they do.

The real issue is for the fans, who really wants to pay the price of an over priced ticket to a game where there are none of the teams stars involved? I wouldn't & what they should do is slash the ticket price for games like this, anyway I'm getting away from the original point, sportsmouth is of the opinion that each origin team should be announced on the Sunday following the last game of the round (no monday night footy that weekend) and both teams should do it side by side making a big deal of it, similar to how the yanks show the draft for some of their sports on t.v, then both teams go straight into camp for the rest of the week & play on Friday night, making them available for their club games on the weekend & with some smart organising by the NRL makes sure that teams that are less affected play on the Saturday. Now one argument that'll come out is, it'll cannabalize the crowds for the weekend games, again this is where the fixtures need to be organised properly, make sure that if the Origin was played in Sydney, then the only games played in Sydney that weekend are local derby's held at the local venues, simple really!

A little fore thought from the NRL would solve this issue, although I'm the first to admit the NRL/ARL/NSWRL/QRL have bigger issues to resolve (that's right all those people have a say in the running of the game, its a joke!) its probably lucky at this stage that we don't have more teams privately owned, like English soccor they wouldn't want to let there highly paid stars risk injury in a game that is not for the club!!

That's it for now, if you''ve got a topic you'd like to vent about sport, please feel free to pass it on.

Sportsmouth.