Maroons seek to avoid historic State of Origin sweep as Hayley Maddick makes up for lost time
After two humbling defeats to New South Wales, Queensland's players are at risk of suffering the ignominy of the first women's Origin clean sweep since the series was extended to three games last season.
'The shield's gone, but we still have plenty to play for,' Maddick said ahead of her Origin debut. 'We've got family coming down, we've got people watching the game, and we're playing for a bit of dignity.'
Queensland fought back in last year's series to claim game two and then the decider, but this year the contest has been more one-sided. The Blues have been dominant in the first two games – with 32–12 and 26–6 victories – and the Maroons' fortunes took another blow when Jillaroos fullback Tamika Upton was ruled out of the third match.
The 33-year-old Maddick's football fate has long been intertwined with Upton's. They both enjoyed outstanding touch football careers before joining the Broncos in the NRLW and both are elusive ball runners and playmakers. Maddick describes Upton, who is five years younger than her, as one of her best friends. The pair will even reunite at the Broncos this year after Upton's departure from the Knights.
Maddick's elevation from Maroons backup looked likely when Upton went down clutching her leg, but her debut was not guaranteed until a call from coach Tahnee Norris. 'I saw her calling and my heart started racing,' Maddick said.
The former NRL touch player of the year only debuted in the NRLW in her late 20s, and speaks with reverence about the likes of Upton and Tarryn Aikin. 'It's funny, because I'm inspired by so many people that are so much younger than me, and I love listening to them speak and the way they think about the game, like Tamika and Tarryn,' Maddick said.
She was invited to trial with the NRLW Broncos in 2020 but actually turned down her first contract offer. 'I was probably a little bit naive,' she said. 'I wanted to keep playing touch [football]. But the second I said no, I regretted it.'
Maddick is now making up for lost time, and in 2024 produced the best season of her short career. 'It's not unusual in women's sport, because everyone has a different background, but I only really started playing footy seriously in my late 20s, and in all honesty, it felt like last year I've finally got a grasp on the game properly.'
She will face a confident Blues line-up, who made the most of an error-ridden Maroons in game one and adjusted better to torrential rain in game two. 'Conditions really were awful in the last game, so that obviously changes a lot of things in the style that you want to play,' Maddick said.
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'It probably benefited New South Wales and the fact that they've got really big, strong girls, I think we've got really good, crafty, smart players, but conditions didn't really allow for a lot of ball movement.'
The Maroons must also overcome an opponent buoyed by strong home support in Newcastle, the city which has become the capital for women's rugby league. But the team remains optimistic given the outcome at McDonald Jones Stadium last year, when Lauren Brown slotted a late field goal that swung momentum to the Maroons on their way to the shield.
A near-capacity crowd of 25,782 attended that night despite the inclement weather, underlining the emergence of the women's game. 'I'd love to be a teenager at this point coming into the game now,' Maddick said. But she noted it still had some way to go. 'I hope it gets to a full-time wage – at the moment, it's not – but even still, just being a part of it while it's growing to that point is exciting.'
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Times
2 hours ago
- Times
Funky fields and ‘Bazball' batting — 2005 Ashes was trailblazing series
It was a series ahead of its time. 'It definitely felt like in that Test series we were playing a different form of Test cricket to anything that had been played previously, particularly in the aggressiveness of some of the batting,' Andrew Strauss, England's opener in the 2005 Ashes, says. He is right. It was not quite Bazball, which peaked for England at 5.50 runs an over in their Pakistan series in 2022, but England's run rate of 3.87 in that Ashes series is their 12th-fastest ever (the top nine are all in the Bazball era) — a series that they won, remember, against an attack of Glenn McGrath, Shane Warne and Brett Lee, with the fourth bowler (either Mike Kasprowicz or Jason Gillespie) mercilessly targeted, even though they were two very fine operators. This was a series, among many other unforgettable moments of greatness, in which Kevin Pietersen was hitting the great McGrath back over his head on debut in the first Test at Lord's and smashing rather than defending his way to a draw with 158 in the fifth Test at the Oval. England also scored 407 all out (at a run rate of 5.13) on the first day of the second Test at Edgbaston after being put in by Ricky Ponting. Whether or not it remains the greatest series of all time is a matter of opinion, but it certainly had an impact on the game. Take the bowling by right-armers from round the wicket to left-handers. It had been done before, of course, with England's Craig White having had some success against Brian Lara, and there had been some images floating around of Pakistan's Shoaib Akhtar really troubling Adam Gilchrist with that tactic at the end of a spell during the previous winter. But here was Andrew Flintoff neutering Gilchrist, one of Australia's greatest weapons, with that angle of attack. The left-hander, who changed the role of the wicketkeeper-batsman for ever, averaged only 22 in that series, without even as much as a half-century, dismissed four times by Flintoff, all from round the wicket. England's dressing room during the 2001 Ashes had a whiteboard detailing the Australia batsmen's weaknesses and, as a result, plans to dismiss them. Next to Gilchrist's name there was nothing but a question mark. It has been said that the 2005 plan came about by accident when Flintoff had to move to round the wicket because of a dodgy foothole in a one-day international at Lord's earlier that summer. Whatever the genesis, as Simon Jones later revealed in his autobiography, by the time of the first Test, the whiteboard read: 'Go around the wicket and cramp him for room.' It was no surprise that England had come up with a plan of some sort because the head coach, Duncan Fletcher, was a stickler for the importance of angles in both batting and bowling. In exasperation he once asked Marcus Trescothick: 'Did you do geometry in school?' when Strauss's opening partner was unable to fathom the gist of Fletcher's thinking, with the coach playfully slipping a couple of protractors under Trescothick's door while on tour in Sri Lanka. Before the 2005 series Fletcher had warned Strauss about the danger of the angles he was creating when playing Warne's leg spin. Strauss wanted to move across his stumps and play everything to the leg side with the spin, but Fletcher suggested, if the ball was short enough, that Strauss stay leg-side of it and punch it with a straight bat through cover. 'I'd just got a hundred against [Stuart] MacGill [another Australian leg spinner] six months before and I remember thinking, 'I think I'm OK here, mate,' ' Strauss says. But then in the second Test at Edgbaston, Strauss was spectacularly bowled around his legs when trying to pad up to Warne. He changed his mind about Fletcher's advice and turned to the Merlyn spin-bowling machine for hours of practice. 'Warne didn't get me out at Lord's but I did think, 'These angles are tricky for me,' ' he says. 'At Edgbaston it became increasingly obvious that I had to play it differently. Fletch was very counter-intuitive in that sense of looking to score off the back foot through the off side rather than looking to hit everything leg side. That was Fletch's genius. He was the only coach I think who really told me things I'd never really considered in the game of cricket before. 'It was like learning a different language but it certainly did help me. We had that Merlyn bowling machine and I remember facing thousands of balls off that. But it's one thing doing it against the Merlyn machine and another doing it against Shane Warne in the middle of an Ashes Test match.' Playing against the spin, as long as the length is right — either short enough or full enough — has now become an accepted coaching tip at the top of the game, with Rahul Dravid's famous email to Pietersen when the England batsman was struggling so badly against left-arm spin containing just that advice. Mind you, those problems of Pietersen's were mainly brought about by the introduction of the Decision Review System, which was not in place in 2005, and caused players to think about playing finger spin very differently, representing a huge change in the game from that time. 'It didn't affect me quite as much as some others,' Strauss says. 'I was always trying to get my bat in front of my pad anyway. Back in the day people used to squeeze the ball between bat and pad, but you couldn't play like that any more.' The round-the-wicket to left-handers theory was much more of a problem for Strauss, as South Africa's Morne Morkel later exploited it remorselessly. Gilchrist's weakness would undoubtedly have been acted upon more quickly these days. England may now be reining in the size of their analysis team a little but there is still a whole heap of data out there for teams to use. Back then there was very little. 'Obviously we'd worked out that Gilchrist really struggled with that angle,' Strauss says. 'What we didn't have at that stage was the deep statistical analysis to back up our hunches. In the latter stages of my career it became obvious that was an angle that was hard to contend with. In those days we were very much using Fletch's eye, where technical weaknesses might occur. 'Increasingly these days you will find out a player's weakness very quickly in a way that probably took longer back in those days. I was a good example. You come into Test cricket, you have a good run and then after a year or so people start working you out. That time is definitely shortened now. To a certain degree everyone knows everyone anyway because of franchise cricket, but there's fewer places to hide these days.' As Mark Garaway, England's analyst from the following winter onwards, tells me, we now know that Gilchrist was a right-eyed-dominant left-handed batsman, and so the angle from Flintoff round the wicket and reverse-swinging the ball away meant the ball was constantly going into the line of his less preferred left eye. The solution would have been to close off even more in his stance. Nowadays bowling round the wicket to left-handers for right-arm bowlers is almost de rigueur, but as David Warner consistently showed in his horror times against Stuart Broad, it does not mean that batsmen can counter it successfully. That 2005 Ashes was the first time in living memory for most of us that Australia were really rattled by an England team, particularly by the reverse-swing from Flintoff and Jones. Both of them achieved that reverse-swing in both directions, away and into the batsmen, which was quite a new phenomenon after the years of booming in-swingers from the likes of Waqar Younis (there were no wobble-seam balls yet), but they also bowled a good length doing it, rather than just the toe-crushing yorkers of yore. Australia just could not generate that reverse-swing in that series, and so they set about pinching the Australian bowling coach Troy Cooley back after that series. When they played England for the first time thereafter, Cooley said to the Australian players: 'Boys, today, eyes in the middle, no looking elsewhere. Just worry about us.' As Gilchrist later recalled in his autobiography, 'It was like a boxing glove came out and smacked me in the head and said, 'You idiot. That's what you were doing for the best part of three months in England — worrying about what the opponent is going to do.' ' The field placings by the captain, Michael Vaughan, contributed to this too. There are some funky fields these days, but Vaughan startled Australia with some of his arrangements, placing a short extra cover at Edgbaston for Matthew Hayden, who immediately hit one there to Strauss, and constantly playing on Hayden's ego that thrived on the boom of a straight drive by placing a catcher so straight that he was almost on the cut strip. Much was made of Pat Cummins's Bazball-spooked immediate use of sweepers at Edgbaston in the first Test of 2023, but it was the smart use of sweepers and in-out fields by Vaughan that also cornered Gilchrist back then. 'They were agile with their field settings,' he said. 'I certainly always felt traditionally that field settings to me tended to follow a certain path and then evolve through an innings, but it felt like they were setting quite unique fields to me in that 2005 series. There might be one slip and a floater and almost a fly slip or deep backward point, clearly targeting an area, on or just outside the off stump.' We sometimes bemoan the lack of bouncers and physical threat in today's game, and it has become an understandably sensitive subject since the tragic death of Phillip Hughes in 2014, but 2005 was not for the faint-hearted. The first morning at Lord's was a brutal examination for the Australia batsmen. As the opener Justin Langer has said: 'It felt more like an AFL grand final or a State of Origin clash between Queensland and New South Wales. Everything seemed to be racing in fast-forward. Matty Hayden was hit in the helmet, Ricky [Ponting] had his face cut open. It was more like a war than a chapter of the gentleman's game.' 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The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
Crows handle the hype to break Collingwood hoodoo in strange thriller that had the lot
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The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
Young Australians may endure worse lives than their parents, ‘worried' productivity chief warns
Young Australians may endure worse lives than their parents, the nation's productivity chief has warned. Danielle Wood, chair of the productivity commission, said young people are facing a future of lower wages, increased costs and the impacts of climate breakdown without major government action to tackle major economic challenges. Wood also urged the government to not put new regulations on AI, claiming existing rules on fraud, safety and discrimination are already sufficient – an argument running counter to human rights experts and unions calling for greater protections against abuse and for workers. On the eve of the Albanese government's economic reform summit, with its key focus on productivity, Wood will address the National Press Club in Canberra on Monday. She said Australia must adopt a 'growth mindset' and boost productivity to solve looming problems for future generations, saying it was 'the only way to sustainably lift wages and opportunities over time'. 'Overwhelmingly, young people today believe they won't live better lives than their parents did. As chair of the Productivity Commission, I'm worried too,' Wood will tell the Press Club, according to a speech notes released ahead of the address. Sign up: AU Breaking News email Wood's speech blames recent Australian governments for key challenges facing young people, pointing to 'policy choices' for house prices growing faster than incomes, and claiming politicians have 'for so long avoided the lowest cost policy choices' in dealing with climate change. Wood will say that productivity comes from better skills and training, new technologies, and policy settings making it easier to switch jobs or run a business. The commission has, in the lead up to the roundtable, released several major reports suggesting changes to tax settings, workforce issues and training, and technology among others. Amid criticism of the summit before it had even been held, the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, maintained the exercise had already been a success, claiming it had helped focus Australians' attention on productivity and the economic challenges faced by the government. A YouGov survey of 1,500 people, conducted for community organisation Amplify, last week found 73% of Australians either did not know or were unsure about the summit, and only 29% were confident it would lead to meaningful change. Around two-thirds of people surveyed believed productivity increases would mean people had to work harder, with the benefits going to bosses, but the same percentage believed it would lead to more job opportunities. 'We've focused the country on the productivity challenge. We've gotten people accustomed to dealing with the economic and fiscal trade‑offs that governments deal with every day,' Chalmers said on Sunday. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion Among the key issues to be discussed through the roundtable is AI. Business and tech groups have urged the government to embrace a light-touch approach to legislating it, saying over-regulation could stunt the productivity benefits associated with the new technology. The government is still debating how best to respond to AI, with a diversity of views among Labor voices. The former industry minister Ed Husic had set out plans for a standalone AI act to regulate the field, while the new minister, Tim Ayres, has spoken about regulation and legislation among plans still to be decided. It is unclear what Labor will settle on. The commission has set out proposals for how tech, including AI, could be regulated and treated in Australia, suggesting it could add up to $116bn to Australia's GDP. However, the commission was strongly criticised last week for suggesting big tech companies be allowed to mine Australian copyright content – including music, literature, art and journalism – to train their AI models, an idea advanced by the Tech Council of Australia and its chair, the Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquharson. The Tech Council on Monday released its submission to the roundtable, where it again called for 'copyright reform' including 'narrowly tailored text‑and‑data‑mining exceptions and increased access to high‑quality Australian datasets' to help train AI models. 'Australia's current copyright frameworks are restricting frontier AI innovation. Training foundation models depends on text and data mining,' the submission read. Wood's speech notes contain no repeat of the PC's controversial suggestion for a copyright carveout, but she will again call on the government to not over-regulate AI. 'While managing the risks is important, we do not think that a new and overarching regulatory framework for AI is the way to go. That's because the risks posed by AI are mainly existing risks,' she will say. 'AI may make it cheaper, easier and faster for bad actors to create harms, but most of these harms – from product safety, to discrimination, to fraud – are already covered by regulatory frameworks.'
