Can Queensland Actually Pick A Team To Beat New South Wales?
TOWNSVILLE, AUSTRALIA - JUNE 09: The Maroons walk from the field after losing game one of the 2021 ... [+] State of Origin series between the New South Wales Blues and the Queensland Maroons at Queensland Country Bank Stadium on June 09, 2021 in Townsville, Australia. (Photo by Ian Hitchcock/Getty Images) Getty Images  Queensland suffered a record defeat against New South Wales last week, going down 50 to 6 in the first game of State of Origin, arguably Australias biggest sporting event. Naturally, there has been an inquest into the result, the historic failure and the general malaise that currently afflicts rugby league in Queensland. Outside of the state representative team, all of their representatives in the National Rugby League (NRL) are currently underperforming, with their showpiece club and traditionally the biggest provider of talent to the Queensland Maroons, the Brisbane Broncos, second last in the ladder. Prior to the game, New South Wales had been accused of leaning too heavily on the Penrith Panthers, one of the clear standout teams in the NRL, when they picked 6 players from the club for their side. On one side, there were those who thought that the Panthers were too inexperienced, with three making their debuts at Origin level, while on the other, there were those who posited that bringing the unit in collectively could only bolster the Blues. With Jarome Luai and Brian Too among the standouts on the night, the latter case was proven true. It seemed worthwhile finding out if this theory held any water on an organizational level, however, and there is a clear expert in this field: former Australian rugby union international Ben Darwin, co-founder of Gain Line Analytics, a Melbourne-based firm that deals in exactly this kind of thing. Gain Line have modelled thousands of fixtures, across multiple sports, to come up with what they call TWI, a measure of the cohesion that a team has. The most important thing to understand is what cohesion is, says Darwin. People look at it from an output perspectivetheyre getting on really well, or playing in an effective mannerand that part is of no interest to us.  Were not interested in whether people get on or they dont. Were also not really focussed on outcomes, were only focussed on inputs. We focus on how a team is put together and what are the drivers of how it is put together.  Theres two different models: the franchise models and the representational models. The representational models will oftentimes be a victim of happenstance, of conditions under which people dont have a large amount of control.  For example: the cohesion in Australian rugby union has changed dramatically over a very long period of time, but none of that has anything realistically to do with the people who are coaching the team. They really dont have a huge amount of impact on that.  If you look at the Wallabies over the past 25 years, every coach thats come in has gotten worse than the guy before him. Thats not a coaching thing, its a structural issue. Some of those guys are very talented and some not so much, but it doesnt seem to have any variation on the outcome.  State of Origin is very similar. Craig Bellamy (arguably the best club coach of the last 20 years) has the worst record for New South Wales. Laurie Daley, as a coach for New South Wales, was, in many ways, not a victim of his own failures but of what he was up against, which was, at that point, a Queensland team with numbers that were absolutely spectacular. They were spectacular for 8 years and he just caught the tail end of it.  In that sense, it makes perfect sense to import a level of cohesion from somewhere else: in New South Wales case, from one of its own highly successful club sides. With franchises, the cohesion is fundamentally a representation of the philosophy of the club, explains Darwin. Penrith and Melbourne, currently, are the two highest TWI teams in the NRL, and that manifests itself in the performance on the field. It doesnt happen straight away: Penrith started changing philosophy in 2013 but it didnt start to pay dividends until 2017, 2018 and 2019. New South Wales has no control over this, and they dont tell Penrith what to do, so the happenstance for them is that theyve now got this group coming through and its making a huge difference. In many ways, New South Wales are doing to Queensland what Queensland did to them for a long period of time.  Queensland have no standout club team and a smaller player pool, but are not necessarily hampered by this. What is difficult, a lot of the time, is that Queensland is functioning on a smaller basis of players and so have a small form of cohesion in that, when theres noone left to choose, you have to keep picking the same people. Youve got a smaller base line of talent.  Smaller countries in the Olympics will do better in team sports than bigger countries comparative to size. New Zealand has won 40% of medals in team sports, whereas Great Britain is 10%, China and Japan are around 5%.  Many people in Queensland believe that everyone north of the border is special and different, and maybe this is rude to Queenslanders, but they foist this attitude onto the team and people from that area, which makes no sense from a geographical or attitudinal perspective.  They breed them different up here has no fairness. We saw in Origin 1 that everyone in the Queensland team was doing everything that they could, but their system was so dysfunctional that no individual would be able to overcome it, and New South Wales was so functional that they annihilated Queensland. Theres no individual at fault in this, its just how it plays out.  In this sense, the model that Darwin works with reflects some of the great soccer teams in history: the Spain team of the late 2000s and 2010s, that won the World Cup and two European Championships, had a core of Barcelona players; the great Dutch sides of the 1970s were based on Ajax players and the great Soviet teams drew heavily on Dinamo Kiev and their coach Valeriy Lobanovskyi. Theres three ways to win a World Cup, or any tournament in a representational sport, says Darwin. Theres singularity, that is to say, all through the same club. The second part is keeping the team together for ten years, like Australia in the 2006 FIFA World Cup, who were a group that had been together for many years. Or a very high level of stability through a two year basis leading into a tournament. In the 2019 Rugby Union World Cup, South Africa did it with a bunch of Stormers players being with the national team leading in.  NICE, FRANCE - JUNE 27: The Iceland fans applaud their fans after the UEFA EURO 2016 Round of 16 ... [+] match between England and Iceland at Allianz Riviera Stadium on June 27, 2016 in Nice, France. (Photo by Catherine Ivill - AMA/Getty Images) Getty Images  However you get cohesion, it doesnt care where you get it from, as long as you find a way to get it. It allows the team to function well.  Of course, it is easy to gloss over cohesion and concentrate on individuals: nowhere more so than in journalism, where it is much easier to write a story in praise of a player than delve deep into the often arcane, boring and random nature of team structure. What people say when they do well is Well theyve got Nathan Cleary, or theyve got Cameron Smith and of course theyll win. But when teams with large amounts of talent have no cohesion, theres a high level of dysfunction. Brazil 2014, they got beat 7-1. Its about allowing a team to play to its potential.  According to Darwin, the act of playing together is the important part, rather than winning together. While that might give Maroons fans some confidence, there is a sting in the tail. Failing together has the same effect as winning together, says Darwin. It has the same impact. When we look at cohesion, we dont look at where it comes from, in terms of did they win or did they lose.  Look at Iceland, and how much they lost through the juniors: as under-16s, under-18s and under-21s they were annihilated but when it came to play against England in the 2016 European Championships, their numbers were 220% higher than Englands. Those kids had basically never won anything, but cohesion doesnt care.  They dont play enough games as Queensland to be successful. Its not possible. Theyre only playing three games a year and will never get enough games as Queensland to be successful. You have to build. Fundamentally, if you dont have a cohesive team underneath you that is built properly, you cant draw from anything. It may not be possible right now for Queensland to pick a team that can win.  But its also highly dependent on New South Wales and what they do. Its not about picking the same team, its about picking a cohesive team. They could pick an entirely different team and still be more cohesive than Queensland.  The silver lining for the Maroons might be that, while their cohesion levels are low, sport is still infinitely random and prone to upsets. This is also about probability, concludes Darwin. If I make up a number and say that there was a 74% chance that NSW would win, but if they walked on the field and Nathan Cleary tripped over, hurt himself and went off, then Jarome Luai got injured in the first ten minutes, the outcome changes.  That happened in Origin a few years ago: Cooper Cronk came off and Queensland lost the game. Theres probability mixed into this. Im not saying Queenland cant win, because we cant know that. Anyone who tells you what is going to happen is lying. But we know Queensland dont have a cohesive team to pick right now. Theres isnt one to be found. And thats the problem.  The NRL Outsider drops every week. To read it first, subscribe for free above by clicking in the top right-hand corner of your screen. You can also follow my work on Twitter at @MikeMeehallWood.