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Who is going to win game 1?
We rate players based on their ability to accumulate useful counting statistics. We call this accumulation production and then do some maths on it to convert different stats to one footy currency. Taking account of positional play, time on the field and the general milieu of the season, we can create a lot of numbers that we can use to assess individual performance. In theory, summing up the individuals should give an indication of team strength.
First, the year-to-date form of each player selected for Origin:
The only area Queensland’s individuals have collectively outperformed NSW’s in 2026 is in the back five. The Blues’ second choice centre pairing has a lower rating than their very capable equivalents in the centres for the Maroons (even if Tabuai-Fidow is out of position - we make no allowance for this) but Queensland are also carrying the lowly rated Jojo Fifita. Ponga makes up some significant ground on Tedesco, thanks to his red hot start to the season, but you’d be hard pressed saying that makes him definitively a better player.
Elsewhere though, the form of the platoons leans, in some cases very heavily, blue and the overall team rating is strongly in the Blues’ favour. If anything, the poor record of the Eels, and to a lesser extent Mitch Moses, so far in 2026 underrates his capability.
The primary advantage, and likely what will decide the game in the Blues’ favour, is in the starting pack. This won’t be news to anyone, just as it will be obvious that part of that gap could be closed by selecting Finefeuiaki and Luki over Cotter and Capewell. The impact of bringing those two in and pushing Cotter and Capewell further down the team list and pushing Nikora - who’s Z rating is 7, not 77, not 107, just… 7 - elsewhere altogether, speaks for itself and would be the simplest way to improve the Maroons by the numbers. Bringing in Reece Walsh and slotting Kalyn Ponga into the three-quarter line is another, but more difficult to demonstrate with certainty.
Second, the career-long experience accumulated by the Origin players:
The Blues lineup is significantly more experienced than Queensland’s. James Tedesco remains one of the highest rated players in the NRL era by this metric, and is getting on in years, so naturally flatters the Cockroaches’ numbers.
The disparity in the forwards is once again extremely concerning, not least because the Blues starting five all have careers that puts each of them in the top decile of all players in the NRL era. The corrollary of experience is age, so there is perhaps some hope that the theoretically younger, less experienced Queensland team can run rings around the old dogs.
Finally, the production that these players have put together in Origin games:
This chart is a bit deceiving, as Origin rookies count for precisely zero but we would expect them to still make some sort of impact in 2026. Compare the previous career experience, where Addin Fonua-Blake brings 12.6 WARG, the third most of the Blues, but zero previous OFTy. If you are particularly interested in the mechanics of Origin FTy, there is some detail after the paywall.
In the olden days, I would have a means of turning these numerical disparities into a approximately quantified probability of winning the game. The Blues tended to have a 5% advantage in win probability and it was very rare for their to be a surplus of good Queensland players at any time.
This series appears to be no different but the results speak for themselves.
Where do Maroons come from?
In 2022, after the first men’s game, Lion Co took the four Xs off the left sleeve of the Maroons’ jerseys and replaced them with postcodes. The postcodes were notionally meant to represent the communities from which the players had emerged.
For game 3, XXXX and the QRL changed these to highlight other communities and this is how you get Kalyn Ponga dropping the 4740 of Mackay for the 4725 of Barcaldine, a town of about 1,000 people that is a six hour drive from Mackay and eight hours from Mt Isa, the two towns that Ponga seems to have grown up in.
This promotion tied-in with limited release cans with a single digit printed on the label - the idea was to assemble your own postcode with XXXX cans and share a picture on social media - and proved so popular that Lion brought it back for 2023 and then extended it to the women’s team in 2025.
For a marketing campaign by a Japanese-owned corporation, this still manages to break through the thick crust of irony and magma layer of cynicism to reach my heart (and my wallet). Not just in a sense of pride that this vast and inhospitable landscape that we call home creates and moulds people who come together to do extraordinary things, but also because this is data we can analyse. We can start to sense where Maroons come from by the places they choose to shoutout on their sleeves.
A few years ago, I theorised that the state government’s priority development areas of Ripley, Yarrabilba, Greater Flagstone and Caloundra South would be the wellspring for future Origin talents. It is too soon to tell if that will definitely be the case but we can see what the current Maroons were up to ten or twenty years ago.
While we could easily pull the birthplace of every player, being a Queenslander is not strictly about being born here. Junior club records are not well defined and can be confusing to trace but a postcode at least indicates there is something about that place that is likely to have been formative to that player.
Rather than trying to plot the density of shoutouts in individual postcodes - most of the Brisbane ones are tiny against the scale of the state - or even local government areas, I’ve classified players by their health service. Strange as it sounds, this is the best system for regional divisions across Queensland that is also readily available. While there is some stolen valour (Gympie, and Tino Fa’asuamaleaui, should be in Wide Bay, not Sunshine Coast), the major towns tend to be grouped appropriately.
In the age old river city rivalry, northern Brisbane (12 shoutouts for Metro North) seems to be at a disadvantage to the southern suburbs (19 for Metro South) and even the Penrith of Queensland, the Gold Coast (17).
Surprisingly, Mackay (16) has been much more productive than the other North Queensland regions. Even Central Queensland is on par with Cairns and Hinterlands (9 each). This is partly a function of the narrow window in which we are looking - over long enough, density of Maroons should reflect population - but also there are several stalwarts and walk-up selections of the current Maroons, including Cherry-Evans, Cotter and Dearden, that just happen to originate in Mackay, Sarina and surrounds. Similarly, Upton, Munster, Grant and Hunt form the Capricornia contingent while only Val Holmes and Gehamat Shibasaki have wanted to rep the Townsville region (4). Only Ali Brigginshaw has picked a postcode in Ipswich, although I expect this will increase once Sam Walker and Ezra Mam takes on their first non-replacement assignments.
Unsurprisingly, there aren’t a lot of inner city postcodes. We don’t see any 4000, 4006 or 4101, like we might have in the first half of last century. Julia Robinson opted for St Lucia (4067) in this year’s series, while Pat Carrigan and Christian Welch represented the eastern suburbs of Holland Park (4121) and Camp Hill (4152) respectively, and Makenzie Weale and Lindsay Collins both selected the Stafford area (4053). These suburbs are all about an eight to nine kilometre drive from the CBD.
Robinson’s selections of Samford Valley (4521) and St Lucia seem strange - no one is “from” St Lucia, it’s a place you live while you go to/work at UQ - given she was born in Ipswich (4305) and went to school in Ferny Grove (4055), and if nothing else, reminds us that this is not a precise science, the players might not be taking this super-seriously and we shouldn’t either. Consider Destiny Brill playing with 4124 (Greenbank) in 2025 and changing to the adjacent 4118 (Browns Plains) for 2026. Was that a mistake, are there two sides to her family separated by the Mt Lindesay Highway, or did she just move house down the road? Does any of that actually matter when it’s all north-west Logan with Mo Fotuaika and Jaydn Su’A?
Tarryn Aiken was born on the Central Coast in NSW, played some junior footy with Wyong and later moved up to Tweed Heads, where she moved from touch to rugby league in 2019, and played for the Seagulls and the Broncos. You will notice that, while Aiken resided in the greater Gold Coast region, there isn’t a great deal of Queensland residence in that synopsis. Aiken could hardly be expected to run out with 2259 (Wyong) or 2485 (Tweed Heads) on her sleeve, so she opted for Coolangatta (4225), which is as far south as you can get while still having a postcode start with a four. We can only imagine the furore if it was a two.
Share the potential for furore
Should Tarryn Aiken play with a 2485 sleeve? It would be very funny if nothing else. We should bring back Greg Inglis to play with 2440 while we’re at it.
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