Flashback 1995: How a 'ragtag team of nobodies' made Origin history

The 1995 State of Origin series remains the ultimate underdogs tale.

With the Super League war ruling an array of superstars ineligible, both sides were virtually unrecognisable from those that had taken the field a year earlier.

A total of 15 Origin debutants took the field in the series opener in Sydney, but it was Queensland who had been hit hardest.

The Blues still boasted a myriad of internationals including Brad Fittler, Rod Wishart, Paul Harragon, Tim Brasher and Paul McGregor, while the undermanned Maroons had been labelled “Neville Nobodies”.

Cue rookie Maroons coach Paul 'Fatty' Vautin addressing his first team meeting in a way that made his men feel like they could run through brick walls. And Maroons manager Chris ‘Choppy’ Close’s sprinkling of passion – and tears – to reinforce how much wearing the jersey meant.

It’s a series that “should never, ever be forgotten in our history”, according to Close.

“Origin has never ever been about the best players, the fastest players, the strongest players… it’s about guys who want to get the job done with heart… that’s what Origin simply is,” Vautin said.

Nobodies to Somebodies

1. Baby Ben and The Kumul Kid

With 22 Origins to his name, Vautin was no stranger to this arena. But he was a stranger to coaching. And he had the daunting task of selecting a team without any Super League players, including the Brisbane Broncos, who had traditionally dominated Maroons sides.

“We put together this ragtag team of nobodies, has-beens, never-going-to-bes...  Nevilles,” Vautin said.

“When we’re picking the team, it was Arthur Beetson, Les Geeves, Dud Beattie from Ipswich, great Queenslanders, all of them… and we’re picking the team one by one.

“Started with Robbie O’Davis, Matt Sing, we get up to the halfback and Adrian Lam… someone said ‘where’s he from?’ and someone said ‘Papua New Guinea’. And someone said, ‘well we can’t pick him then’ and I said, ‘no, hang on a minute… New Guinea was joined onto Queensland in four million BC’. And Les Geeves goes ‘you’re right, we can pick him’. That’s how he got the No.7.

“It went on and on and on and then we picked our reserves… Terry Cook, Craig Teevan, Mark Hohn… and there was one spot left.

“We could not think of one person to pick, so whoever is getting picked is getting picked by default. And then Beetso goes ‘there’s a kid down the Gold Coast, he’s played three first-grade games… Ben Ikin’ and I said ‘Who?’

“I said, ‘is there no one else?’ and he said, ‘well no there’s not’ and I said ‘alright, pick him'... that’s how Ben Ikin got picked.”

Given those were the circumstances, it was no surprise Vautin did not recognise Ikin when he arrived in camp the next day.

“The next day, we’re gathering for this meeting and I get in the lift and Matt Sing’s in there... I knew him... and then this kid gets in and he’s got board shorts and a singlet and thongs, and a cap turned backwards, and he gets in and he looks like he’s a delinquent, he’s escaped from somewhere,” Vautin said.

“We get up to the fifth floor and me and Matt Sing get out and we start walking. And I just had this feeling ‘I think this kid is following us’... I said ‘stop right there, now listen, if you want some autographs from the team and myself, you’ll have to wait down in the foyer, we’ll be 20 minutes’, and he goes ‘I’m Ben Ikin. I’m in your team, you idiot’.

“And I’m like ‘you’re Ben Ikin… oh my God… come on champ, let’s go win a series 3-nil’. And off we went. Never looked back.”

“That year, it was the day when you used to have to watch Channel 9 to see who was going to get in the side… the announcement of the team was on free-to-air,” Ikin recalled.

“So I’m sitting there with my two roommates, freshly moved out of home, and we’re watching the team being read out. And you know, I was a bit clueless myself. Robbie O’Davis was fullback and I was like ‘who is that?’ Clearly they’re not picking Super League players. Adrian Lam, didn’t know him either.

“They got to the bench and we were like ‘OK, what’s left over to make the interchange?’ and I think it was Cracker, John McDonald, read out ‘number 14 from the Gold Coast Seagulls, Ben Ikin’. And everyone’s jaw collectively hit the ground.

“My phone rang, I reckon it was half a second after my name got read out… it was my old man, he sounded like he was crying… the first thing he said to me was ‘is there another Ben Ikin on the Gold Coast?’ and I said, ‘no dad, it’s me, I got in’. Get up to Travelodge the next day and ride the lift with the coach (who was) clueless.”

Vautin said that 1995 team gave Queenslanders belief in Origin again after they had lost three consecutive series in 1992-93-94.

“New South Wales had a wonderful team that looked unbeatable for the next 10 years but along came this team,” Vautin said.

“We’d seen the New South Wales team and I’m looking, 11 internationals, all the kings… Chief (Paul Harragon), Spud (Mark Carroll), Steve Menzies, Andrew Johns, Matthew Johns, Tim Brasher… it was the who’s who of rugby league.

“(When people looked at our team they thought) ‘we’re going to get beaten by 50, 60, 70’… but, I’ll tell you what happened, as soon as the team rocked in and I looked at then, I laughed to myself and said ‘we’re going to do this’.

“I don’t care who’s in their team. All we see is blue jumpers and they’re running at us... (all we needed to do was) smash them, put them on the deck, make them get up, make them work for it.

“I didn’t care who was in the team. Didn’t matter. Blue jumpers, that’s all I ever saw.”

2. Make them believe

There was no doubt in Fatty's mind his team of would get the job done. He just needed to make them believe.

“What I saw in the team… I saw hope and I saw people wanting to just give whatever they had for the Queensland jumper,” Vautin said.

“I just kept going on about what we’re playing for and about who we’re playing for, that jumper and what it means to me and what it what it was going to mean to them. (About) doing your best in that jumper.

“I talked about Origin and what Origin can do to a man. Origin will go to the bottom of your soul and it will try and rip it out.

“But you have to get through that… and if you’re bleeding, you’ve got a bad knee, a crook arm, can’t raise a spit and your mouth is dry, and you have to get up and make another tackle, mate, you’ve just got to do it. That’s what Origin is. I explained all that.”

Vautin said he tried to get Close – who had played nine Origin matches and received man of the match in 1980 and 1981 – to speak, but he was too emotional and only managed very few words.

“The way Fatty delivered (the first meeting), the confidence that (he) delivered it with and the belief that (he) instilled in every one of those players on that that day, it was palpable,” Close said.

“I walked out of that meeting, I rang my wife and I said ‘we're not punters but get all of the money you can and back us because we will not get beaten’. I felt like that and I wasn’t even playing. Imagine how the players were feeling after that introduction. They believed in themselves.”

Ikin said it was an unbelievable feeling, being in that room.

“My childhood dream was to wear the maroon jersey so that’s where I’m coming from in that room, in that moment… it was a realisation of everything I wanted,” Ikin said.

“I was supposed to play in the Queensland Under 19s side, so this is a bit of a step up. Listening to (Fatty) talk about, in very clear detail, about how tough Origin is, what’s required to win an Origin series, and how much belief he had in us to do that because he’d been there himself… been in Queensland teams that had been written off… it gave me the confidence. And I’m a skinny 18-year-old kid with no idea.

“I think it gave everybody the certainty we needed to go out and win.

“One of the greatest memories I’ll have in my life, not just in footy.”

The 24-year-old halfback from PNG agreed.

“I remember the first moment I walked into that team room for the team meeting and looked around and knew nobody in that room really and just thought ‘we’re just a bunch of guys that are here for an opportunity’ and Chris Close, the manager, spoke and cried,” Lam said.

“I remember him crying and me looking and thinking ‘gee whiz this is serious’. I think that connected everyone collectively as a group and then we had Fatty… he was an unbelievable person to be able to inspire everyone to step up with the jersey on.

“The message from Fatty and from Chris Close, who are guys we all looked up to with so much respect, was pretty much ‘you’re a Queenslander, when you pull that Queensland jersey on you’re going to do your best for the state, for your family and for yourself’, and that we could definitely win the series."

3. 'Queenslander'

Billy Moore shouting ‘Queenslander’ in the SFS tunnel – as captured on the Nine broadcast – goes down as one of the most famous Origin moments of any series. It sends goosebumps up the most hardened of spines.

Vautin said he brought the chant back that year to inspire the Neville Nobodies and it worked.

“The ‘Queenslander’ call hadn’t been around for a few years and I felt it meant something so I reintroduced it,” Vautin said.

“They played as good as we let them. That was it.

“(Game One) I walked into the shed, won 2-0, everyone’s got a XXXX in their hand… beautiful… I remember the first thing I said was ‘now do you believe? Do you believe in yourselves and what you’re playing for and what we’re doing here?’”

Moore, who played 17 times for the Maroons between 1992-97, reflects on a remarkable series.

“Well, you think about before Game One we had one former Australian player, nine rookies, no one else had played for Australia, our coach hadn’t coached, even our manager, it was his first time as a manager… all of a sudden something special happened,” Moore said.

“The key thing was from the very first moment of the first camp, it wasn’t who wasn’t in the Queensland team, it was who was there. We believed in each other. And we never thought that anything other than winning was going to happen.”

4. The MCG erupts

The almighty brawl that broke out during Game Two in Melbourne was one born from Close stirring – or motivating, as he put it – certain players.

And Vautin making the side aware that New South Wales hated the ‘Queenslander’ chant and were ready to smash whoever said it.

Close said he took great pleasure in laying the platform for that melee on the first day of the first camp.

“Dick ‘Tosser’ Turner said to me, ‘Chop, I want you to get as much inspiration into them as you can’ and I thought ‘well I don’t know Jed (Gavin Allen) very well but I know how he thinks and I know how he plays’,” Close said.

“I said, ‘Jed, I’m glad you’re in this team and I’m glad I’ve run into you because I heard from the boys down in Sydney that they’re glad you got picked’ and he looked at me and went ‘yeah?’ and I said ‘yeah, they think you’re a bit soft and they’re pretty happy you’re in the side’. And (he’s) gone ‘we’ll see’.”

Before Game One, Allen had asked if he was allowed to fight, but nothing eventuated until Game Two.

“I said ‘mate, it’s Origin… do whatever you like’… I’m going ‘wow this is going to be good’… Game Two, it erupted,” Vautin said.

“It was a pretty big game. We’re in Melbourne. If we win it, we’ve won our first series since 1991.

“Day of the game and I get a whisper about the 'Queenslander' call. A mate of mine says ‘the New South Wales guys are hating the Queenslander call and Phil Gould has instructed them the first time that one of those blokes in the maroon jumper yells ‘Queenslander’, smash him’.

"So I’m saying this to our boys…. I said ‘there’s the challenge boys… who is going to yell it first?’ and 17 hands go up, then the bus driver and then Dick ‘Tosser’ Turner. They’ve all got their arms up and I thought ‘this is going to be good’… I was like ‘alright let’s go’.

“Not long into the game, there’s a scrum being packed and Wayne Bartrim yelled it out. He was the first one. We’re sitting up in the grandstand and even from there we hear this ‘Queenslander’.”

And it was on.

“I know people say the Australian jersey is the pinnacle, but for me, because I watched that first Origin game in Cairns around the TV, our little black and white TV in Cairns, with my dad and all my brothers and sisters and family, we just thought (Origin) was the greatest thing we’d ever seen,” Allen said.

“With Arthur Beetson and the first fight that they had. I remember the next day we all went to school and everyone’s punching each other, pretending to be Arthur Beeston. From that day, I grew the desire to play for Queensland.

“We knew we had a relatively inexperienced side so if we wanted to get a little bit of an edge, we might have to put a bit of blue on in the scrum.

“We spoke about it at training before that first game… we get on the field and we’re going that well, it was after about 10 minutes, we’re packing our first scrum and Tony Hearn goes ‘it’s on, it’s on’ and I said, ‘leave it mate, we’re going well, so we’ll leave it alone’. So it didn’t happen until the second game."

The message from Vautin was clear going into Game Two.

“I remember Fatty saying, ‘we’re going get it over and done with and we’re going to put it to bed and we’re going to play football’. And the boys did exactly that,” Allen said.

“I had a couple coming at me. I think I had (Paul) Harragon, he wanted a piece of me because I’d knocked him out in a game a few years back and he’d been chasing me ever since. It was his chance to get back at me. And I think (Greg) Florimo, he might’ve come in from the side.

“I’ve never seen a football team come together that quickly and just bind so quickly. Not one person in that side wanted to let anyone down and no one wanted to be that bloke that let anybody down.

“We deserved to win the game. We deserved to win the series. You don’t always get what you deserve in life… this time we did. I don’t think we won the fight, but we won the series.”

Maroons warhorse Gary Larson, who played 24 consecutive Origins between 1991-98, sums up the passion perfectly.

"You bleed blood for the Maroons jersey, run through brick walls when you’ve got the Maroons jersey on… we believed in each other, we had each other’s backs and that worked really well on the football field,” said Larson.

Mark Coyne, who 12 months earlier had scored one of the most famous tries in Origin history at the SFS, said winning Game Two showed passion could trump skill.

“It was an amazing series where we were not given any chance of winning and then to obviously come out and win that series 3-0 is still something that I pinch myself about,” Coyne said.

“Helps you recognise that you’re never really the underdog even when people think you’re the underdog, you can always rise above that.

“Weirdly enough, I live next door to Gus Gould (now), so I fly the Queensland flag during Origin time just to annoy him. I know it gets under his skin.”

5. 'I can't think of a better place to die than Lang Park'

Maroons captain Trevor Gillmeister was hooked up on a drip in his hotel room just four hours before kick-off in Game Three.

One of the game's toughest players, Gilly was battling a severe infection after his leg had been stood on and opened up in Game Two.

Dirt or fertiliser had entered his blood stream. His body was toxic. Taking the field seemed out of the question. 

"Trevor was running a temperature and showing signs of significant infection, so we'd put him in hospital," team doctor Roy Saunders told Rugby League Week in 2015.

"If you get full-blown septicaemia it can get very nasty. He could have died. There was a real risk of him getting significantly sicker.

"I had persuaded him not to play but then Fatty, Choppy and Tosser arrived."

For his part, Gillmeister was distraught, fearing he would miss the crowning glory of completing a clean sweep on home soil.

"At that point, I still wasn't saying too much, because I was shattered," Gillmeister told RLW.

"That is when Choppy piped up and said, 'Well, I can't think of a better place to die than Lang Park'.

"Fatty had a golden staph years before when he was in hospital after snapping his Achilles. So Fatty says, 'Infections mate, they are not good'.

"Then he goes, 'But not blokes get the chance to captain their state to a 3-0 whitewash, especially when they are rated no chance of getting close, let alone winning... and not forgetting you get to hold the shield up at the end.

"That's when I said to Fatty and Choppy, 'Why didn't you two say all that from the start! Righto, I'm playing."

And so it was that Gilly played, the Maroons wrapped up a whitewash, he got to hold up the shield at The Cauldron... and then headed straight back to hospital to stay on a drip until he was better.