The annual State of Origin circus is about to begin.

Everyone already has their Origin bingo cards lined up:

1. The annual selection debate, which will see NSW factions argue and push their own agendas. The debate about Tommy’s fitness, how many fullbacks can be squeezed into the side and Joey Johns pushing for about 30 blokes who “must be picked” and toot his own horn when a few of them actually do.

2. There will be pleas with the refs to refrain from blowing the pea out of the whistle and not send any blokes off, the “duty of care” trumpeted all year goes out the window – and we love it. Post-Origin will come the query “why can’t we just ref NRL games the same as Origin?”

3. Queensland will trot out the expected 1-16 with a bolter on the bench. The “Maroons loyalty” in selection will be trotted out, but realistically, there’s just not too many options. The back row and forward bench stocks looks particularly average.

4. We will again discuss the Origin scheduling.

Another thing, which doesn’t get the attention it deserves nor the criticism it warrants, will be the announcement of the team selections.

They are debated weeks in advance – all of the panel shows ponder, muse and argue about the selections. How do we find out about it? A Twitter leak from a journalist, which is then circulated is the most common approach.

ARL chair Peter V’landys is an astute a businessman so how on earth can he let this happen year upon year?

Why isn’t there a marquee event held on Monday night announcing the teams? There’s the usual arguments, “well the players would have to fly or travel there and it would leak anyway”, and “we don’t want to have more travel for the players”. Both simplistic attitudes that can be worked around.

Laurie Daley. (Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)

It is absolutely amateur hour that we find out the teams via a Michael Chammas tweet or Peter Badel on radio. Also why is the NSW team released on the Monday and the Queenslanders wait until the following morning? It makes absolutely no sense and is complete mis-management.

We’re looking at expanding the game, we’ve gone into Vegas, we’re going into Perth and PNG and we can’t even get the announcements of the teams done properly.

This should be an event, a ticketed and broadcasted event. Have the coaches on a panel explaining some of the selection decisions, hell, do a Netflix special which releases the behind the scenes discussion at the end of the series.

It’s time to fix this and it’s a complete nonsense that this is occurring.