Source :- THE AGE NEWS
In the lead-up to this year’s State of Origin series, the members of the unbeaten and unchanged NSW team of 1996 penned letters and recorded video messages to the current squad, aiming to help inspire them to success.
“Mine was about that team,” said Brad Fittler, the Blues captain that year. “We’d come off the year before where it was split [because of the Super League war].
“That group was special to us because there is something unique about all three games with the same players. Also winning 3-0 and getting beat the year before.”
Three decades on and Laurie Daley’s side is in a different position, approaching the decisive third game of the series at Suncorp Stadium on the back foot after a dramatic second-half collapse in Melbourne last week.
The performance has intensified the scrutiny on Daley’s decision-making and led to calls for sweeping changes for Brisbane.
Fittler, however, maintains this year’s team have the chance to leave their own legacy, 30 years after the reunified Blues’ clean sweep against Queensland – who had famously won in 1995 with an assembly of so-called nobodies coached by Paul “Fatty” Vautin.
Andrew Johns has identified the 1996 series as the one in which he fully grasped State of Origin for the first time, and according to Fittler, circumstances have presented the 2026 Blues with their own opportunity to seize the moment.
“I think they’re in a great position,” Fittler said at the launch of the NRL’s Beanies For Brain Cancer Round on Tuesday.
“Everyone is ripping into them, they’re all getting criticised. It’s times like this where I think the whole sort of idea of Origin breaks through to a team, about representing your state. I think this is our time.”
Fittler well knows the challenge of a deciding match in Queensland as both a player and as a coach.
In his six years in charge of the Blues from 2018 to 2023, there were two of them, both claimed by the Maroons, before Michael Maguire’s NSW won the series in Brisbane in 2024.
“It is hard,” he said. “You’re not going to get any favours, and you’ve got to fight for everything. We fought in Melbourne but didn’t fight for long enough.”
As well as the fortunes of the Blues, the NRL’s partnership with the Mark Hughes Foundation to combat brain cancer is dear to Fittler.
A commentator at Nine, the owner of this masthead, he worked for many years with the network’s former NRL boss Matt Callander, who masterminded the Beanies For Brain Cancer Round and died from the disease in 2017 at the age of 46.
Callander’s daughter, Maddy, works at Nine as a senior producer for the company’s sports coverage.
This is the 10th year of the round, in which funds are raised through the purchase of beanies.
Perth Bears assistant coach Ben Gardiner, who lost his sister Sandra to brain cancer in 2023, told his family’s story at Tuesday’s launch in Sydney, as did Laura Clarke, whose husband Alex was Wests Tigers’ senior athletic performance coach. He died as a result of a brain tumour in January.
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Chris Barrett is a senior sports reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former South-East Asia correspondent for the Herald and The Age.Connect via X or email.
