State of origin selections stuff up - here we go go again

Top news of the week is the state of origin selections for NSW, and as in previous years we are trying yet another theory. If you can remember last year when we said we were going for youth and we were going to stick with them through the series. So we picked Peter Wallace at halfback, Terry Campese 5/8 and Robbie Farrah at hooker. By game 3 it was Brett Kimorley, Trent Barrett and Michael Ennis.

Well this years official theory is that we want size out wide to combat Hodges, Inglis and Folau. So we picked an untried rookie in Jimal Idris who is suppose to stop the queensland centres from the NSW bench. How is he suppose to stop them, through sustained sledging? (Actually that might work if someone we gave Jimal speech training so string together a sentence - and put Rodney Rude on the NSW staff to write put downs.)

Now stop me if I'm wrong but wasn't it Idris who failed to stop Matt Cooper on Friday night not once but twice as he ambled casually onto score for the Dragons - lucky Idris will start and hopefully finish on the bench.

This has the look of last years campaign to it where we threw a bunch of youngsters to the wolves and then promptly sacked them after only one average performance. (If only Australian cricket used the same policy, Michael Clarke would be out of the 20 / 20 team and we would could have unleased David Warner on the poms, instead of having Clarke run out the entire top order just to get off strike.)

So what is the answer to the revolving door of NSW selection - the Melbourne Rebels.

Here let me explain - most of Queenslands top players come from the Melbourne Storm. The Storm have made big dollar 3 year contracts to their players which they are obliged to meet or better - then they back ended the contracts. What that means is that they have yet to pay most of the money they promised the big name players.

So their options are to do what Canterbury did - which is to not sign any big name players for 3 - 4 years. They eventually only managed to get their head above water when their only big name signing (sonny Bill) left the club.

The Storms problem however is that their salary cap for next year is entirely committed to 6 marquee players once you take into account contract back ending. So to field a team next year they will have to get some other team to promise to take most of their stars at their current salary, and that's where the Melbourne rebels come in with the trusty old News Limited cheque book.

This is already starting to happen with Folau the first to go announcing that he is going to Rugby Union on Monday 12 July of thereabouts. By the end of the year we can add Billy Slater and Greg Inglis and possibly Cooper Cronk.

Its either that or they can go to AFL, who are offering a million dollars a year to NRL players who have never even played the game before. (This gives you a bit of an indication of exactly how easy the game must be if you can pick it up and make the first grade team after only 3 months of pre season training.)

Now if we can only get rid of Thurston and Prince we could be in with a chance next year.

ln other news
The media is fawning over Jessica Watson on mass after she managed to do what every 16 year old can only dream about - ie spending 200 days with nothing else to do but spend every waking moment on face book. Why this was news is anyones guess really, perhaps it was because she did it without running into anything - something that looked long odds back when she started.

The 200 days of boredom did come in handy though as the first thing she did when she got of the boat was have to listen to a speech by Kevin Rudd.




Damm boat people - still coming in at the rate of a boat a day. Still this one would have actually managed an around the world record if she didn't go so far out of her way to avoid Christmas island