Former rugby league star turned world champion boxer Anthony Mundine has shown while he’s still proud of the sky blue jersey he wore in the late 1990s, his anger over his departure from the team remains.
Mundine posted to Facebook on Wednesday night after the Blues’ 32-6 demolition at the hands of Queensland in Game 2 to send them 2-0 down in the three-game series, reminding his followers of his abilities at five-eighth.
“Those that followed my career know I run this game too,” Mundine wrote.
“Pumped them all – Daley/Fittler/Johns, every time 6 years straight!
“They wouldn’t give me my just dues!
“So I bounced and became 3 time world boxing champion in 3 descending divisions.”
Mundine played one Origin series for New South Wales in 1999, scoring a try in Game I on debut, but never saw further representative honours.
Dropped for Matty Johns, Mundine would retire from rugby league in 2000 to pursue boxing, citing racism in New South Wales rugby league.
Mundine told News Corp in 2009 that he was advising young Aboriginal players to move to Queensland for the opportunity to play representative football.
“I‘ve told a lot of young Aboriginal boys to go to Queensland to play … they’ll give ’em a run up there,” Mundine said at the time.
“A black player would have to do three or four times more than any other bloke to be a chance in NSW.
“Politics and racism are part of the scene in rugby league. That‘s why I got out.”
In 2016, he told Fox Sports that he wasn’t given the appropriate respect for his abilities by selectors at the turn of the century.
“I talked out from the get go because they’d never given me my props in league,” Mundine told Fox Sports.
“They’d never give me my props.
“I whipped (Laurie) Daley, I whipped (Brad) Fittler. Continuously. Not one time, two times, three times, four, five. I’m talking five years. Over five years straight.
“It cut me deep, man. They had to pick me in the State of Origin and then they messed me around; playing me off the bench, playing me in positions I’d never played before — in the forwards, in the hooking role.
“When I left in 1999, early 2000, at the end of ‘99 they took a team to England. They don’t pick one squad, they pick two squads, like 42 players to go — and I wasn’t even part of that.
“And I was the best statistically that year. We made the grand final and I whipped what they called the best in Brad Fittler all year. And my statistics were second to none. That’s why I left.”
With Fittler now likely at the end of his term as New South Wales coach after the loss at Suncorp, Mundine is likely not the only Blues fan letting their emotions pour out, with Jarome Luai roasted on social media for his Instagram post at 4am after the game.
“Chill,” Luai wrote in the early hours of Thursday morning.
“All you idiots have work tomorrow morning,” along with seven crying laughing emojis.
At the bottom of the image Luai then wrote: “we go again,” alongside a samurai emoji.
The post quickly spread around social media with fans left in disbelief.
Andrew Voss said the upload left him “gobsmacked”.
“I am looking at an Instagram post and I am gobsmacked,” Voss said on SEN.
“What the hell is that. This is not a player representing the state.
“Jarome Luai, how is anyone meant to take that? Jarome Luai, what the hell have you done?
“How could an Instagram post be a motivation after losing a game and the series is lost?”
