Hugh McGahan: Risky approach may be winning formula

State of Origin series between the New South Wales Blues and the Queensland Maroons. Photo / Getty Images

Watching Origin the other night highlighted for me how sanitised rugby league is these days.

I'm not talking about bringing back the biff, which a number of people would like to see happen, but every game is largely the same.

Everyone plays the same style of football. It's all so staged, so choreographed. Players know exactly what they are supposed to do in certain situations and at certain times and where on the field they should do it.

In the past it was up to the ball-carrier to decide what to do and everyone else ran up in a line off the back of that. These days, everyone runs a prescribed line and are restricted to an area on the park - right side, left side, up the middle - and there's no spontaneity. It's probably why we see a log-jam on the NRL ladder with no team jumping out from the others and, equally, no one being left behind.

At one time, you knew exactly what you would get. The Bulldogs used to beat teams up with their big forward pack, the Raiders of the 1990s loved to throw it around and had gamebreakers like Mal Meninga, the Walters brothers, Laurie Daley and Ricky Stuart.

Now, everyone plays exactly the same way. The only difference is the quality of execution and it's often the best players who make the difference.

I enjoy watching rugby league these days but maybe I am sanitised to it as well. It means there are fewer mistakes and the ball is in play longer and we're all brainwashed into thinking that dropped balls equates to a poor game. More risks means more mistakes.

It's changed the way I think as a coach now. I look after the Westlake Boys first XV and I would be out of a job pretty quickly if I tried to play in a way similar to what we did in the 1980s and 1990s.

I would love to go back to that style and take a few more risks but I appreciate the fact the boys watch how the big boys play and try to replicate it.

When I know my players are trying to do something different, I never jump on them because they are at least trying something. It's when they make the same mistakes over and over that I let them know it's time to revert to a different approach.

The Warriors have the potential to play a different style and blow open the competition. They have always had players who have the ability to play ad-lib football but the present team need a couple more top-quality players to achieve it.

At the moment, they really have only Shaun Johnson who is able to break a game open - he's the only one in the competition who can do what he does - and he can't do it on his own. He needs another couple of players around him, perhaps another halfback and a ball-playing second-rower, for the Warriors to contemplate a change.

If a team could master a riskier gameplan, they would be hard to stop because players are so brainwashed to do the same thing over and over that they wouldn't know what to do.