By MICHAEL BYRNES
WHILE the player welfare conversation around concussion has taken centre stage in 2017, the blackest mark on the NRL continues to be the ongoing cataclysmic debacle sometimes referred to as the tackle and play-the-ball area – still the ugliest facet of the rugby league spectacle by a wide margin.
I often find myself contrasting the lawlessness of the rugby league play-the-ball with the overly-technical, pedantic oversight of rugby union’s breakdown – certainly at opposite ends of the spectrum. In rugby league, the TV experts all seem to share the view that the fewer penalties in the game the better and their assessment of the referee’s performance is usually based on that metric. And while there are situations where discretion is justifiable (policing the ten metres, for example), I can’t help but feel that the pig’s breakfast that’s currently served up to the viewer in the post-tackle is at least partially attributable to the referee’s long-standing reluctance to imprint himself on the game.
Put simply, our whistleblowers have lost all concept of how to adjudicate the ruck. They have no feel for it. They allow the tackled player to play the ball facing the sideline, half standing, without using the foot, tangled in defenders who are still trying to get to marker, a metre forward and to the side of where the tackle was effected. That basic scenario has become commonplace. It is in every respect a pig’s breakfast.
At one time, a one-on-one legs tackler was not supposed to be disadvantaged for his superior technique and was allowed additional time to clear the ball-carrier. I’ve seen it penalised and not penalised in 2017. Without exaggeration, you could list ten pages of similar discrepancies from the first five rounds. And the media criticise the players for not knowing the rules? Maybe where the ruck is concerned, there actually are no rules.
Of course, this greyest of grey areas in our game is the product not just of poor officiating but of constant revisions in ruck interpretation over the past twenty years. In the era of the ten metre rule, the game’s tactical footprint has essentially become distilled to a single imperative – control the speed of the ruck at any cost. As coaches have fixated on that key discriminator, the governing body has struggled to maintain a consistent and shared understanding of what is acceptable and what isn’t in the prosecution of the tackle and play-the-ball. As a result, each year they’ve layered bandaids over bandaids in terms of ruck interpretations. Dominant and surrender tackles anyone?
Yet in 2017, we still have a situation where the referee is coaching the players through the whole delay-the-play-the-ball process, calling release him now two seconds after calling held, assumedly for the benefit of the TV mic’s, while the tacklers go about their business unperturbed.
For the players, the tackle has become an angry, angsty, ill-tempered affair, to such an extent that I can’t help but feel it significantly reduces the enjoyment factor in playing the game at elite level today. Andrew Johns has, in the recent past, suggested as much (The Daily Telegraph, 24 Sep 2012, Wrestling Tactics Continue to Hurt Rugby League with no Solution in Sight). Of similar mind, I certainly watch most games these day with gritted teeth.
As much as the NRL has engaged in frantic arm-waving in outlawing specific forms of grapple tackle over the last 10 years (chicken wing, chin strap, crusher etc), under the guise of player safety, it has shown zero appetite for eradicating the lowest common denominator post-tackle wrestling that has embedded itself in the game and blights most NRL clashes today.
Naturally, there is an obvious solution to all of this…
