The Storm avoid civil war at Origin time by buttoning the lip, writes Brad Walter.

As the Origin I team announcements loomed, Craig Bellamy and the Queensland players in his Melbourne Storm side barely mentioned the series.

With Bellamy the NSW coach and several of his club players - headed by captain Cam Smith - certainties for the Maroons side, there was the usual banter that goes on in most sporting teams, but no serious discussion about State of Origin among a club divided along interstate lines.

"It was more stuff coming from us than from him," Smith told the Herald as he prepared to again line up against Bellamy and four of his Storm teammates in the Blues squad, Brett White, Ryan Hoffman, Anthony Quinn and Steve Turner.

"I was just giving him a couple of selection ideas, about who I thought should have been in the NSW team, and he obviously had a bit of a chuckle.

"It was all just good fun. We didn't really talk about too many things, I guess, because he was the coach. The only time we really spoke about it was when he asked me who I thought was going to be in the halves after there was all that debate about whether Scott Prince should play or Karmichael Hunt would be five-eighth. I just said to him who are going to be your halves, and he obviously wouldn't tell me, so I didn't tell him what I thought."

Since the series opener, won 18-10 by NSW after a performance Smith describes as being "the closest thing I would imagine to playing against the Storm", little more has been said between Bellamy and Smith or the other five Melbourne players in the Queensland side, Billy Slater, Greg Inglis, Israel Folau, Dallas Johnston and Michael Crocker.

But what is it like to have your club coach, the only person you've ever played under in the NRL and someone you've enjoyed premiership success with, plotting to shut you down, as the Blues so effectively did to Smith in Origin I?

"I knew it was going to be a tough game for us because I know the way he prepares his teams, but I wasn't expecting it to be so hard to play against," Smith says. "Everytime I looked up to have a kick or wanted to come out and have a run they just had me covered. I was getting pretty frustrated really. I think the ref could have done a better job … just with their markers, but at the end of the day they did a really good job on us.

"It doesn't matter who he coaches against, he is going to do a lot of homework on their players and I expected that because he's not going in there to try and get the Blues to play well, he's in there to win. With the way he coaches we knew we were going to be up against a tough team because any team he coaches is always coached well, and they're always prepared well.

"I don't think I've come up against a NSW team that has defended like that before. They just gave you nothing when you had the ball, you'd look up and there would be a straight line. There weren't blokes taking dummies, there weren't blokes coming out of marker at me.

"I don't think he would have done too much different to any other coach coming up against the Storm boys but he really would have drummed it into them more, so come the game they all know what they had to do in defence and what they had to do with the ball."

According to Bellamy, talk about his having inside knowledge on Smith and his other Melbourne players is "way over-rated". With video, statistics and other modern technology, he says any information a coach needs on opposition players is available at the click of a mouse.

"At the end of the day, I'm doing a job for NSW so I try to do the best I can, and they're playing for Queensland so they're trying to do the best job they can for Queensland," Bellamy said. "I probably do know a couple of things more about them but if they've got a weakness or they've got a strength … it's a team game and sometimes how well Cameron Smith plays, or how well Johnathan Thurston and Justin Hodges play, is how well their teammates play.

"It's not like we just prepared to play against the six Melbourne players and we didn't do any work on Thurston or Hodges or Petero Civoniceva or whoever."

Yet Origin was built on the slogan "state against state, mate against mate", and an implied hatred towards the opposition that started when Arthur Beetson punched his Eels team-mate Mick Cronin in the very first match.

It has led to fractured relationships between club mates and even players and coaches who have been on opposite sides in the interstate war.

After Andrew Johns came out of representative retirement to help NSW level the 2005 series, former Queensland coach Graham Lowe urged then Maroons coach Michael Hagan to put his state above his loyalty to Newcastle and "take out" the Blues playmaker. Lowe told the Herald he had made a similar decision in the final 1991 match, which ended with Queensland winning after his Manly skipper, Michael O'Connor, was forced from the field with facial injuries after a heavy tackle by current Queensland coach Mal Meninga.

"Taking a player out, I'm not quite sure what that means but you do try to limit their effectiveness," Bellamy said. "We tried to reduce the effectiveness of all the Storm players but we also tried to do the same with Thurston and Petero and Hodges and all of them. When you go into camp, you're working for NSW and they're working for Queensland, so I'll leave that there.

"It's obviously not easy because it's an important period in everyone's lives, State of Origin. But we're all professional enough to know that when it is over we've all got a job to do with the club."

After Origin I, the Storm players all agreed not to discuss the match once they reunited with their teammates the next day.

"There is a little bit of you're not mates when you play, you hate each other, but there's no point coming back into camp having that sort of attitude," Smith said.

But after the series is over, the only ones at the Storm who won't want to talk about it will be those on the losing side.

"It would definitely be nice to win against him and come back to the Storm then," Smith said. "To tell the truth, I was filthy after the first game to have lost to him, so to lose the series I couldn't imagine what that would be like. It would be pretty bad, I guess."