New South Wales will be hoping to use their home state advantage to clinch the 2025 State of Origin series when they host Queensland at Accor Stadium on Wednesday night.
What the Blues won’t be doing is entering the venue prior to kick-off via the tunnel which connects the NSWRL Centre of Excellence to the playing field.
For the past six Origin matches at the venue, NSW have warmed up on the field at the nearby CoE, before making the roughly four-minute walk onto the Accor Stadium surface.
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In a change of plans this year, coach Laurie Daley has nixxed that move, with the team instead set to warm up in the Accor Stadium changerooms and enter the field through the western tunnel, normal procedure for every other game at the ground.
Daley is hoping the switch will ensure his side are ready to go from the first whistle, avoiding the same slow start which cost them in Perth, or the emotion-charged beginning to Game 1 last year which saw Joseph Sua’ali’i sent off early on.
“It’s a fair distance. A lot longer than what you think it is,” Daley said of the tunnel on Big Sports Breakfast this week.
“It’s just something we spoke to the boys about. You know when you first arrive at the ground, you walk up through the tunnel and you see the crowd and you feel the energy and the buzz.
“When you’re at the Centre of Excellence, there’s no crowd, there’s no noise, no lights, you just prepare and then you walk up the tunnel and then it hits you.
“I don’t know if it makes that much of a difference or not, but if it makes half a per cent in our favour, it’s well worth doing.”
Blues captain Isaah Yeo, who has helped steer Penrith to four straight grand final victories, three of which have come at Accor Stadium, backed the decision.
“It can be a really good thing but in previous years it probably hasn’t served us overly well, just in terms of that emotion,” Yeo said on Tuesday.
“It’s just about being a bit more normal. Any sort of big game you play at Accor normally, you’re in the Accor sheds.
“It was getting tossed up a little bit last year as well and we chose to go with the tunnel, then obviously things happened pretty early on.
“It’s just a bit more normality to it, you warm up in the sheds, you sort of do what you normally do for a big game.”