Twenty-four hours before Nathan Cleary redeemed himself in the eyes of the Blues faithful, the ultimate State of Origin scapegoat offered an interesting perspective.
“Nathan’s had a great year,” Mitchell Pearce told the Sydney Morning Herald. “He’s been the best halfback in the comp this season, by a mile. All year people couldn’t believe how amazing Nathan was. He’s played in two losing matches and everyone’s turning on him … It’s hilarious. If Nathan wins this week, people will be loving him again.”
Pearce’s remarks were in reference to Andrew Johns’ call for New South Wales coach Brad Fittler to drop Cleary. It was a firm, public appeal from an Immortal and a Blues great to axe a No 7 who failed to spark during last week’s second-half 18-14 capitulation to Queensland.
Fittler did not drop Cleary, a decision vindicated when the Penrith playmaker was named man of the match in Wednesday’s series-levelling 34-10 win. “I thought his kicking game was the best I’ve seen from a NSW half, in all my time watching footy,” Johns said on Channel Nine.
It was an apt demonstration of the fickle beauty of sport – of liking, then loathing, then welcoming back. We all love to hate the redemption arc, but really live for its drama – that magical quality that permeates big contests.
The spite it whips up is not just spite for the opposition but also for your own, a need to pinpoint the reason your team lost and make it or them pay. There can never be just wins and losses, good games and bad games, on days and off days. This all-or-nothing nature rarely allows for such nuance.
And so Johns described Cleary as “a baby” at Origin level, then five days later sat in the ANZ Stadium commentary box waxing lyrical about that same person, who possesses the same skills, the only difference being he just so happened to have a good shift at work rather than a bad one.
That is not to claim criticism of players is unwarranted. Cleary’s output in both the NRL grand final and Origin game one was below the standard to which observers have grown accustomed this past season. That does not make the sudden about-turn any less amusing.
This kind of volatile environment is not rugby league-specific – athletes the world over are at the mercy of coaches and fans and funding cuts every day. Many a hired-and-fired football manager can attest to the brutal binary approach to success and failure.
Compounding this challenge is a social media-driven world, in which an athlete can talk him or herself out of a performance that befits their level of skill on the basis of a tweet or Instagram post by some abstract anonymous armchair fan. Modern sport is as much a game inside one’s head as it is one played on the field.
To win is to not allow the opinions of others any influence on output. To strip them of meaning. There is a reason sports psychology has become the standard in professional sport. Narratives are there to be controlled, just as much by the receiver of criticism as the giver.
Wayne Bennett has mastered this art. Post-match he sat in the Queensland dressing room sipping a bottle of Coca-Cola and chatting with his players in a manner so jovial one would never have assumed this setting followed a 34-10 defeat. How’s the serenity, Wayne? Probably exactly as serene as he decides it will be.
That composure in itself is one of the reasons nobody will write off the Maroons, despite external discourse about injuries and rookies and being bereft of Fittler’s stars. Bennett is 70 years old. Cleary will turn 23 a few days before next Wednesday’s series-decider at Suncorp Stadium.
As Johns would say, he has much to learn. However, he has also come some way in a single season. On top of his terrific NRL form he has, as he said in September, “done a fair bit of work on [my] mind, and trying to prioritise who I listen to, and whose opinions mean something to me”.
This week, when asked what he thought of Johns’ comments, Cleary replied: “I didn’t know that, but thanks for telling me.” Perhaps he really had not heard the “outside noise”, as he labelled it. Perhaps he had, but chose not to listen.
Either way, he owned his own narrative and harnessed it to his advantage. There were no signs of apprehension before any of those superb kicks on Wednesday night. He did not get the yips before nailing four conversions, and there was no inkling he had dropped his head when, after missing the final two, he continued to go about messing with Queensland’s defence.
He did so in cahoots with halves partner Cody Walker who, incidentally, was the scapegoat for the Blues’ 2019 game-one loss and is now earning praise for his inspired display in his first recall since.
Walker, in turn, replaced the dropped Luke Keary, who is almost certain to feature in an Origin redemption story of his own somewhere down the line. Just as somebody will surely, at some point, call for Cleary’s head once again. It might happen as soon as next week. It is a good thing he is not listening.