Murray Feels Shunned Already

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday June 13, 2007

Brad Walter and Jamie Pandaram

FOR a few minutes yesterday it appeared as if NSW coach Graham Murray wasn't going to speak to the media at Telstra Stadium.

As reporters rushed to interview Brett Stewart, the player drafted into the Blues camp on stand-by for fullback Anthony Minichiello, Murray was left standing on his own.

"Obviously no one wants to talk to me," he said before walking up the tunnel towards the dressing room, where the players were preparing for their final training run.

There had been a misunderstanding and newspaper reporters were unaware they had been supposed to interview Murray while the electronic media spoke to Stewart, with the pair then swapping.

When Murray returned with Blues captain Danny Buderus, he still wasn't in the most easy-going of moods as he spoke to the print media for nearly three minutes before going to front the television cameras.

"It is a disruption, of course it is," Murray said of the setback caused by Minichiello's injury. "You don't get used to it, even at club level you don't get used to it. You just do your best and that's what is happening here."

Again a misunderstanding occurred, as Buderus walked past the waiting print journalists to join his teammates in a team hug at the beginning of the session.

Attempts to call him back went unanswered, perhaps indicating just how focused the Blues are on the task of preventing Queensland from winning at the former Olympic venue for the first time in 12 Origins there.

After four days of eating baked beans out of cans and doing crosswords by candlelight at flood-ravaged Terrigal, the Maroons had little time for pesky reporters either when they arrived in Sydney. Photographers and television crews were welcome to their last hit-out - but reporters were barred.

Instead, Maroons coach Mal Meninga spoke briefly to reporters at the team's Parramatta hotel.

Meninga was self-assured, suggesting the Origin comeback kings had barely noticed the flying trees and floating cars surrounding them during their stay on the Central Coast.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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