‘Standing up for your mate’: Why Gagai ignored punching ban in Origin decider

Dane Gagai admits he may have overstepped the mark after trading punches with Matt Burton during Wednesday night’s gripping Origin decider but when the Maroons centre saw his NSW counterpart run into Kalyn Ponga, he declared: “F— it, it’s Origin”.

The pair were sin-binned after an explosive start to the second half and while both teams had to work harder for the 10 minutes, they were a man down, team-mates said Gagai’s actions helped inspire them to arguably Queensland’s greatest triumph.

“That was just about looking after your mate,” Gagai said. “I saw him running over the top of KP so I just wasn’t going to let it slide and he wasn’t going to let me, I guess, try to bully him like that, so he came at me. It was just on after that.

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“It is Origin and I have no hard feelings towards him.  He seems like a good bloke and I’ve always said that anything that happens on the field stays on the field.

“If it goes the other way and one of their big boys grabs me and bashes me I wouldn’t have a sour feeling towards them because they would just be sticking up for their mates.”

With referees instructed to sin bin any player who throws a punch, fighting has virtually been eradicated from the NRL, but Gagai said he had taken a calculated risk because it was Origin.  

“I kind of just said, ‘f— it, it’s Origin,” Gagai said. “It is standing up for your mate, and standing up for yourself.

“I knew that even thought I got sent the boys weren’t going to let me down and when I came back on, I had a job to do. They showed a lot of courage out there. I couldn’t be more proud to be a Queenslander.”

Maroons hooker Ben Hunt, who sealed the 22-12 win with a 70-metre try two minutes before fulltime, said the incident had lifted the Queensland players as they battled to overcome the loss of Selwyn Cobbo and Lindsay Collins in the opening four minutes.

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“It is kind of a funny one these days. You turn around and they are throwing punches you think well, they are definitely going off, so we are going to have to work harder for a bit while we are down to 12 players,” Hunt said.

“But it also obviously gets the other boys a bit fired up. As a half you sort of get a bit worried, you go around and tell the forwards just to be smart and not buy into it because you don’t want to lose any more but that is sort of what Origin is about.

“It was just passion, there were a lot of aggressive boys out there going hard at each other. It was great stuff.”

Gagai had taken umbrage earlier in the match with Blues five-eighth Jarome Luai after he stood over a heavily concussed Cobbo, whose head caught the hip of team-mate Pat Carrigan as they made a tackle together in just the second minute.

He compared the incident to one involving Queensland team-mate Jai Arrow after NSW captain James Tedesco was knocked out in the 2020 series decider at Suncorp Stadium.

“I know a couple of years ago Jai Arrow was scrutinised for what he did to Tedesco, and it all happened so fast,” Gagai said.

“As soon as he did it he realised he stuffed up. It was just one of those things with passion and the heat of the moment. I know Luai is a good fellow away from the field.”