How the hell do people like Thurtson have the ability to link everything back to NSW vs QLD??? it's the ultimate in little brother complexes. I can assure all the good people of QLD, we are not sitting down hear thinking of ways we can derail teams that happened to be based within your state. To be honest, apart from SOO time, we dont even think if the rivalry.
If it helps to motivate you and your teams then keep thinking we hate QLD, but truth be told we coudnt give a Rats what State the Cowboys play in.
I tend to agree. I wouldn't say it's the people of Qld who are at fault, but their media. They love nothing more than another opportunity, however baseless and flimsy the evidence, to portray Qld as being hard-done by. The result of growing up with limited media outlets all parroting this "The whole world is against us!" mentality can be seen from some of the posters on here. It's not just in the NRL that this attitude is prevalent. Take this passage from U.S author Bill Bryson's 1999 book 'Bill Bryson Down Under', in which he enters a sports store in Cairns:
'Something in the window of a sportswear shop caught (his friend's) eye so we went in. While he was off trying on items of clothing, I chatted pleasantly with the two middle-aged ladies who worked there. I mentioned for no reason- just making conversation really- that Cairns had been much in the news lately.
"Oh?" said one of the ladies, a little coolly.
"You know, the Lonergan case and the Chinese boat people and this poor kid who went missing at Daintree."
"Oh, all that", said the lady with a dismissive air. "They always blow these things out of proportion down south".
Her colleague nodded vigorously
"Whenever there's a chance to make Queensland look bad, they leap on it. It was just the same with the cyclone. I was in Sydney that week visiting my sister and, do you know, they had pages of articles about it."
"Well, it was a big story", I pointed out.
"But they wouldn't have covered it like that if it had been in Western Australia."
"Oh?"
"No. They do it to discourage people from coming up here, you see."
"You really think so?"
"Oh yes. They don't want visitors to leave Sydney. They want to keep them down there. So they take any story that makes Queensland look, you know, dangerous or backward and they twist the facts about to frighten people."
They both nodded in the sincerest agreement.
"It was same with that young couple out on the reef. It's quite evident that it was suicide, but they blew it all out of proportion-"
"All out of proportion", seconded her friend.
"- so that they could make it look like it wasn't safe to go out on the reef".
"And the boy at Daintree?" I ventured.
"They don't know that he's dead at all" she said in the tone of one who has impeachable sources.
"But he's been missing for two years."
"Yes, but he's been sighted all over the Cape York peninsula."
"All over" agreed her friend.
"I'm sorry, are you saying the papers falsely reported his death to make Queensland look dangerous?"
"I'm just saying that all the facts aren't in". She nodded primly and crossed her arms. Her partner did likewise.
And I thought: madder than cut snakes.'
'Bill Bryson Down Under', Doubleday Publishing, p229-230.
Thankfully, with the rise of internet media available from several sources, archaic, baseless paranoia like this will die out slowly over the next couple of decades. Hopefully by then, Qld will realise that not only are we all Australians first and foremost, but that we don't regard them as our inferiors, contrary to what they have been told by their own media for close to a century...
