Daly Cherry-Evans's State of Origin axing doesn't erase his journey as Queensland's fearless leader

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2 days ago

There are great players who play State of Origin, and there are great State of Origin players — a specific breed who just seems tailor-made for the arena.
They're good players who became 10-feet tall and bulletproof once they put on their blue or maroon armour.
They're usually forwards, although Dane Gagai is one of the best examples in recent years, and having them in your team is more often a luxury afforded to squads boasting elite talent.
With a combined one try from 47 games, Ash Harrison and Nate Myles were two of the most important members of Queensland's 'Eight Straight' dynasty because they did the dirty work for Darren Lockyer, Johnathan Thurston, Billy Slater and Greg Inglis to finish off.
But when a team isn't brimming with top-end talent, sometimes we see players who must fill both roles.
And so we come to today's subject: Daly Cherry-Evans.
The 36-year-old Queensland captain has been dropped for Game II in Perth after playing 20 straight Origin contests, including leading the team to unlikely series wins in 2020, '22 and '23.
It's all come to an end as a desperate Maroons side tries to arrest a worrying slide that started a year ago.
Few would argue Cherry-Evans is a better player than Thurston (who played the second half of his Origin career as a five-eighth), Allan Langer or even Cooper Cronk, but perhaps none of them can match the impact of the Maroons' 15th captain in the seven for his state.
And who saw that coming even five years ago?
In his first four seasons, Cherry-Evans won rookie of the year, a premiership, a Clive Churchill Medal, debuted for Queensland and Australia, and was crowned Dally M halfback of the year.
The stage was set for him to become a legend of the game and follow the route of Cronk from bench utility to Queensland Maroons halfback and his first two games — both wins as Queensland claimed its eighth-straight series in 2013 — seemed to confirm it. But something was off.
The smile was a little too painted on, the speech a little too media-trained, the hair a little too … blonde.
A golden boy, wunderkind-type playing on the Northern Beaches of Sydney doesn't gel with the grit-and-grind battler image the Maroons have cultivated over decades of Origin myth-building.
So there was an uneasy feeling when Cherry-Evans's first game as Queensland's starting halfback not only marked the end of a dynasty, but he was, in fact, central to that end.
After failing to make an impact when Cronk broke his arm 10 minutes into the 2014 series opener, Cherry-Evans, in just his fourth Origin game, was handed the famous maroon number seven for Game II.
As Queensland desperately tried to hang on to a 4-0 lead and keep the series alive in the final minutes in Sydney, opposite number Trent Hodkinson went to the line with the ball in two hands.
Cherry-Evans made a pointed decision (he literally pointed with an outstretched arm) to signal he would tackle Ryan Hoffman on the outside. Hodkinson saw this, tucked the ball under his arm, Ben Te'o couldn't close the gap behind his halfback, and Hodkinson scooted through effectively untouched to nab his piece of Origin folklore.
Cronk's return a game later to steer Queensland to a 24-point victory in the dead rubber confirmed he was still the man, and the succession would not be so straightforward.
A year later, Cherry-Evans signed a four-year deal with Gold Coast in March only to backflip in June after three months of rumblings and rumours.
The front page of the Gold Coast Bulletin declared he was "not worthy of this great state" and dubbed him "just another filthy cockroach".
A week before that, he missed the first game of the 2015 Origin series through injury, replaced Cronk in another loss for Game II and was told by coach Mal Meninga he was surplus to requirements for the decider.
DCE was in the wilderness for three years.
There were a few openings alongside Cronk and Thurston in that time, but Ben Hunt, Cameron Munster and Anthony Milford were picked ahead of him in the halves.
Finally recalled for just his eighth game in six years, he got his first win as a starter in the 2018 dead rubber.
But, far from the squad of legends with which he debuted five years earlier, Queensland was suddenly a team in flux.
After winning their 11th series in 12 years in 2017, the heart and soul of their dynasty walked out the door in a little over 12 months with the departures of Cameron Smith, Thurston, Cronk, Slater, Inglis and Meninga.
No-one knew what the future held.
So on-tilt were the Maroons that not even Cherry-Evans, a 29-year-old premiership-winning halfback with almost a dozen caps for Australia, was a sure thing.
"Going forward, there's talk that Michael Morgan can play halfback, and he might be the halfback to take them forward. But they're going to be in two minds now after watching how Daly handled that tonight," former Maroons captain and coach Paul Vautin said after DCE's Origin return.
Smith said the Manly man could have been named player of the match for a controlled and commanding performance and was "a really big chance" to hang on to the number seven, and outgoing captain and future coach Slater was less equivocal as he fawned over the playmaker's performance.
"He led us around all week, he learned the gameplan, in his spare time he came up to a few of us and worked on our combinations. He wanted to understand the plays," he said after his final Origin.
"I think that number seven jersey is his for a long time to come."
And so it was, with interest.
When Inglis announced his retirement two months before the start of the 2019 series, the Maroons handed a number seven jersey with a big 'C' on it to The Artist Formerly Known As Filthy Cockroach.
He inherited a team led by second-year coach Kevin Walters and boasting an uneasy mix of ageing talent and young unknowns. From 2019 to 2022, four different coaches took the reins of the Maroons.
Add to that NSW's core of James Tedesco, Boyd Cordner, Nathan Cleary, Latrell Mitchell and Tom Trbojevic that emerged through 2018, with Cordner the only one on the far side of 26 by the end of the series.
It really can't be overstated how dire the state of affairs were for the Maroons, as evidenced by calls from Queensland officials for Smith to come out of retirement two years after his last game.
The fact the Maroons had so few other options meant the captaincy didn't feel as much like a seal of approval as it was another pressure-laden chance for Cherry-Evans to prove himself.
Losing the 2019 series by just one try in one of the all-time great deciders showed remarkable grit.
Then came his crowning glory in 2020.
In a rare Cherry-Evans performance that can be counted by stats and not just vibes alone, he led the Maroons in running metres, made 35 tackles and was named man of the match as his underdog squad, boasting eight debutants, came back from 10-0 down to beat the Blues 18-14 in the series opener.
They took NSW's best shot in a 34-10 loss in Game II, before winning the series 20-14 in Game III despite being hammered by injuries so badly that jersey numbers 19 and 21 were sighted in the starting backline, naming 14 rookies across the three games.
As impressive as leading the Maroons to the shield was, DCE saved his most iconic moment for the post-match presentation after the Lang Park decider, when he responded to pre-match digs from Sydney papers and backed up by former NSW captain Paul Gallen.
"On behalf of the worst-ever Queensland team, thank you very much," he said with his full chest.
Nothing endears you to an entire state quite like flipping the metaphorical bird to its greatest enemies; in this case, the Blues, Gallen, and The Daily Telegraph.
Cherry-Evans has made a habit of having these moments, and while his post-game speech in 2020 was clearly something he'd thought about beforehand, most of his iconic moments have come on the field.
Things like his expert kicking game laying the platform for Ben Hunt's heroics in the 2022 decider, or his chase-down tackle on Stephen Crichton in Game II in 2023, or nailing a 40/20 immediately after Nicho Hynes's failed attempt and a game-sealing intercept in the 2024 opener.
And when the team is down and out, Cherry-Evans embodies the never-say-die attitude the Maroons have always been famed for.
He aims up, takes on the line, tussles outside his weight class with the likes of Crichton or Hudson Young: the classic archetype of a leader who won't ask his charges to do anything he wouldn't do first.
Like Cameron Smith, Queensland's last long-term captain, Cherry-Evans has never been the fastest or the strongest, but that just means as he's aged, he hasn't lost any athletic tools he once relied on and continued to play his best football in the toughest arena.
And, like halfback predecessor Cronk, you can bet he'll be there when the game is there to be won, saved or simply kept alive.
He knew when to take over — more than once out-kicking the likes of Nathan Cleary and Mitchell Moses — and when to step back to let someone like Munster, Kalyn Ponga, Hunt or Harry Grant cook. Everything is team-first.
It's an approach that has seen him and the Maroons over-achieve throughout an era of phenomenal NSW talent, becoming one of only five men (with Wally Lewis, Darren Lockyer, Cameron Smith and Laurie Daley) to have captained three series wins for his state.
Cherry-Evans worked his backside off over a decade to win back the love and faith of Queenslanders, but the tide can turn the other way much faster.
After the heroics of 2020, boos still rang out on the Gold Coast the following year as he got on the mic after conceding 76 points in the first two games and losing the series despite all three games being played in Queensland.
After all he's done, DCE's exit has been unbecoming, but that's not unique.
Lockyer, JT and Cronk went out as winners, but Slater and Inglis didn't. And even Smith copped some side-eye when he announced his representative retirement three weeks before Origin I in 2018.
Queensland lost the next two series after Smith called time, so perhaps the most important thing for Cherry-Evans's exit was to not leave the Maroons in the lurch.
Ultimately, the team's hand was forced into an early and almost unprecedented ejection for a Queensland captain, but a Simone Biles-esque dismount with 10s across the board may not have ever been a live option.
Getting axed after three straight losses (and possibly his least impactful outing since his 2018 recall) is worse than he deserves, but should he have instead left on the sourest of notes after losing a decider in Brisbane last year?
Munster missed the entire 2024 series with a groin injury — an ailment that can linger — and Tom Dearden only started at halfback for the first time in four years just three weeks ago, a move that now seems very calculated by someone with an interest in seeing how he looks in the number seven.
The immediate futures of halves Sam Walker and Ezra Mam, both of whom have spent time in camp with the Maroons in the past few years, were also foggy at best for very different reasons to start 2025.
So, the notion of Slater dropping his captain after one game of this series would have been nigh unthinkable before the season.
Dearden has been the anointed heir since his brilliant debut in the 2022 decider and the idea of a Dearden-Walker halves pairing is a scary prospect, but Walker is on the comeback from a torn ACL and only truly locked down the Roosters' starting role in 2023 and Dearden, despite have played NRL since 2019, is still only 24 years old.
Munster is years removed from his last trademark Origin performance and the 30-year-old might have to step up as the elder halves statesman for a few more series, but the future isn't exactly grim for Queensland.
Dearden, Tino Fa'asuamaleaui, Reece Walsh, Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow, Xavier Coates and Jeremiah Nanai are just some of the 34 players to debut in the Cherry-Evans era and are all 25 or under, while leaders like Pat Carrigan, Harry Grant and Reuben Cotter are barely older.
And, contrary to the leadership vacuum Cherry-Evans walked into six years ago, the team is now so lousy with captaincy options that it might have made it easier to drop him.
Fa'asuamaleaui, Dearden, Cotter and Grant are club captains, and Carrigan has done the job before. The heart of the team is almost entirely in their mid-to-late 20s with Origin experience to burn.
Cherry-Evans won, almost always against the odds, and took the Maroons through some awkward teenage years, then left the place in better shape than he found it.
You can't ask for much more.
Not bad for a filthy cockroach.