Why Sam Walker is the great unknown of State of Origin I

When it comes to Sam Walker, New South Wales has no idea what is coming their way in next week’s State of Origin opener. 

It’s not that the Blues aren’t familiar with Walker because most of them are. Half of their spine plays with the rookie Queensland halfback at club level.

But with Walker, one of modern rugby league’s great improvisers, that doesn’t exactly help.

“Playing alongside him, he doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time, so it’s especially hard for the other team to know,” said Roosters and New South Wales hooker Reece Robson.

Even recalled fullback James Tedesco, who’s played alongside Walker for the latter’s entire NRL career and has a better read on him than most, is wary of getting lost in the possibilities.

“I know he’ll be looking for some short kicks or passes, I know he’s got some tricks up the sleeve even if he doesn’t always know what they are until they come out,” Tedesco said.

“I’m proud of him, but he’s a young halfback in Origin — you know we’re going to put him under pressure.”

Tedesco’s right about Walker’s youth, but that’s not the same as being inexperienced; that’s important to understand. Walker debuted for the Roosters when he was just 18 back in 2021, which means he’s been on a twin track ever since.

Walker has always been a player it was easy to dream on, right from his rookie of the year campaign with the Roosters in 2021, and when a golden future has long seemed assured, it makes it hard to be patient as we wait for it to arrive.

He will play for Queensland for the first time at 23, an age where many young halves are still just getting started.

Walker is only six months older, for instance, than Parramatta’s Jonah Pezet, who won’t settle in for his first full season as an NRL halfback until he joins Brisbane next season.

But Walker is also in his sixth year of first grade with plenty of the scars that mark a progress to the top, like a lengthy stint in reserve grade when the fire wasn’t catching, or when he lost nearly a year to a knee injury just as he looked on the cusp of breaking through to the upper limits of his abilities.

It makes his first start for Queensland feel both overdue and right on time. He still has the youth of a prodigy, but with over half a decade’s worth of experience to back it up.

Perhaps that is why only now does he seem ready to rise to the Maroon jersey that has long seemed like part of his destiny, because in a game where too many people cannot envision anything that doesn’t already exist, Walker’s attacking imagination seemed limitless.

In just his fifth NRL match, he recorded five try assists, something Nathan Cleary, Mitchell Moses and Cameron Munster, the other three halves playing next Wednesday night, have never done.

Later that year, his fourth touch of the ball in finals football was a match-winning 77th-minute field goal in a sudden-death semi against Gold Coast.

That strike is one of three go-ahead finals field goals Walker has hit in the last 10 minutes of finals matches where the Roosters season was on the line.

Big plays like that have always come easily to Walker. His highlight reels are full of them — wondrous cut-out passes that have a tight spiral Patrick Mahomes would be proud of, or attacking kicks off either foot that nobody else would even think of, let alone attempt, or the chipping and chasing, which he does so often and so well it’s clear he is that lost art’s last and truest believer.

But the spaces between those moments have been another story. Walker was the kind of player who could run before he could walk, but some rugby league problems can’t be solved by brilliance alone.

For all his style and his comfort in making the big play, Walker had to learn the hard way about taking the long way. 

Sometimes it’s the dozen smaller plays that lead up to winning rather than one furious act of skill, where victory must be constructed rather than conjured.

Cleary is the modern master of this style and Munster has learned it as he’s aged. Often, it only comes about through time, practice and a willingness to trade the exciting for the exact.

Walker’s path there has not been smooth and sometimes he has had more energy that his concentration could control.

Through his time at the Roosters, he’s been switched to five-eighth and spent time in reserve grade. That field goal he kicked in his first finals game came after he spent the first 71 minutes of the match on the bench.

There’s been other things to make the road rocky. In 2024, Walker was at the heart of a Roosters attack that scored the 738 points, the seventh most of any team the 116 years of first grade to that point, when a knee injury wiped him out for almost a year.

But progress is not always linear, even for a boy wonder. Tedesco can see the difference in him now after Walker’s spent half a season playing with Daly Cherry-Evans, another expert in slowly torturing an opponent to death one little cut at a time.

The magic is still there for Walker; it’s still the foundation of his game and why he shapes as such a weapon for Queensland, but there’s a little more substance to back it up.

“That [skill] is his big strength and he knows how to play to it. We’ve seen that since he was a young kid coming through, his instincts and how he sees the game,” Tedesco said.

“The development of him has come in managing the team, being a halfback and being a leader.

“I think he’s come a long with that and we’ve seen that, him and Chez (Cherry-Evans) have had plenty of conversations about it.”

That passing of the knowledge from Cherry-Evans to Walker is proof that the latter’s time may have come at last. 

The benefits have been clear with the Roosters enjoying their best start to a season since Walker joined the team. 

His attacking numbers are strong — nine try assists in 10 games, to go with five tries of his own — but his improved ability to build pressure comes through in the 10 dropouts he’s forced so far this year, which is already as many as he accumulated in all of 2024.

So now there is no more promise, no more waiting, just Walker in the famous Queensland halfback jersey, armed with nothing but what he’s always had and what he’s come to know.

He started so early but has still taken the long road and now it has led him here, to the place his gifts have long beckoned him towards. 

They say State of Origin is won on big moments and Walker has been winning those his whole footballing life, only now he’s better at stitching them together.

His arrival here is both past time and a long time coming, a victory for both nature and nurture, due in equal parts to art and science.

How that holds up under the harshest environment rugby league has to offer is impossible to know, for New South Wales, Queensland and Walker himself, until it happens. 

Even after the changes he’s made, not knowing what comes next is the deal you make when you’re in the Sam Walker business, but if Origin footy still belongs to the brave, then business could be booming.

dan