Twenty-three minutes to go, 16 points to make up. After Kalyn Ponga’s contentious send-off, 13 New South Welshmen had all the time in the world to beat 12 exhausted Queenslanders. All the time in the world. So it looked.
Maybe more challenging was that NSW also had to get the better of themselves.
The try that could have sparked the comeback was disallowed thanks to a clumsy obstruction.
A four-man overlap was wasted by a sloppy pass. A penalty was given away in attack for passing the ball off the ground. Another pass hit a teammate, who wasn’t watching, in the back. For 21 of those 23 minutes, the Blue jersey collectively threw up all over itself.
But in spite of themselves, they did it. Nathan Cleary, whose night had been following a too-familiar Origin trajectory, produced a 40-20 kick that turned the tide.
He scored himself, darting through a gap near the posts. Then, with all but two minutes of overwhelming advantage having ebbed away, Cleary put a kick up into the rainy night sky.
James Tedesco had also been having a same-old Origin evening. It was his sloppy pass, to a cramping Haumole Olakau’atu, that botched the overlap, and his back that the other pass hit.
Safe defending the high ball, Tedesco had struggled to impact the game in attack. As so often in Origin, just like the Cleary who dominates club football hasn’t translated to the Cleary in Blue, Tedesco often succumbed to his own desperate need, trying to do too much himself.
But it was Tedesco who led the chase for Cleary’s bomb. It was Tedesco who outjumped the Queensland backfield, Tedesco who juggled, lost, grabbed at, and finally clutched the ball to plant it over the line.
Once Cleary potted the conversion, the biggest comeback in Origin history was complete.
NSW had beaten Queensland 22-20. Or put another way, NSW had triumphed over the worst that NSW could throw at them.
For all the freshness of this match, with 20 new faces since the last time the states played each other, and for all the breakneck speed of 2026 rugby league, the story had for much of the night unfolded like the one we’ve seen so many times before.
Sam Walker, playing his first match for Queensland, slid into place like a key into a lock. His kicking game – long and short, in general play or for goal – was spot-on. His decision-making was relaxed and free. He looked like he had been playing these games for eight years.
Cleary, who has been playing these games for eight years, looked more like the debutant, out of sync with his runners, harried for time. Midway through the second half, Cleary failed to kick the ball on the fifth tackle. Minutes later, in one of the decisive moments of the match, his attacking kick went sideways.
For much of the game he was overshadowed by the Blues’ own first-time playmaker, Canberra’s Ethan Strange, late replacement turned instant superstar.
Queensland scored all their points in the first stanza of the match. They were crushing the Blues. Their precision try-scoring play punished three NSW errors. Dropped balls by Stephen Crichton and Brian To’o twice (you read that correctly) led to four-pointers from Rob Toia and Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow off short kicks and Thomas Flegler off a short pass.
Down by 20 points, NSW hit back with a Strange tackle jolting the ball from Cameron Munster, and then a Cleary grubber for Hudson Young. The formula was clarified: force a mistake with defence, and use the attacking grubber to get behind rushing defenders. Sounds so simple.
The Queensland combinations, until the 57th minute, had a naturalness that the Blues lacked. When Munster or Ponga drifted across field looking for a runner, one always materialised. When Queensland improvised in broken field, they had the confidence to find a teammate in a better position. NSW, by contrast, looked like a misfiring machine, a program with a bug.
Then Tolu Koula, outstanding on debut, tore off down the left wing. Walker grabbed him and then Ponga came in with a shoulder.
His head caught Koula’s, and referee Ashley Klein decided that Ponga had committed a send-off offence and the rest of the game would be 13 on 12.
It gave the Blues an advantage that they did their very best to waste. But they did a Queensland on Queensland; they pulled one out of the fire, in the rain, and won one that they had looked doomed to lose.
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Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.