NRL 2022: Billy Slater defends Felise Kaufusi after Sam Walker tackle controversy
Queensland coach Billy Slater says Melbourne, and Maroons, star Felise Kaufusi deserves respect rather than condemnation.
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Queensland coach Billy Slater wants people to know a thing or two about Felise Kaufusi before they start labelling the Melbourne and Maroons star.
His reputation has been under fire in recent days following a weekend incident involving Roosters half Sam Walker.
Kaufusi has been labelled many things in the aftermath to the weekend, among them a grub for the way he plays the game. Others have slated Kaufusi because of his recent record with the match review committee.
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The latest incident was dealt with by the judiciary and Kaufusi walked away a free man after the panel exonerated him.
“He is a well respected person if you know him,” Slater said. “I know the sort of family he comes from — I played with his brother Antonio and Patty was at the Storm as well when I was there. They are a really humble family and Felise reflects that.
“There are not too many mugs in our game. There are some really good people in our game.
“To be calling people names and categorising people, you have to know them. To be categorising people, you have to be careful.
“The day and age we live in, we want our headlines to be extravagant and sometimes we don’t care about that being detrimental to individuals, or groups of people or families.”
Kaufusi became a target for chat shows and social media vitriol after being charged with dangerous contact over an incident on Saturday at the SCG that left Walker nursing a bloodied nose.
The Storm elected to fight the charge and their argument prevailed. They pointed out that Kaufusi’s first contact with the ball-carrying arm was with the chest of Walker.
They claimed Walker got himself in an awkward position and became pinned to Kaufusi, and when they fell his forearm came into contact with Walker’s head.
Had Kaufusi tried to avoid contact with Walker’s head, he would have risked injuring himself by hyperextending his shoulder. Kaufusi effectively had nowhere to go with his arm.
The touch judge was 10 metres away and thought nothing of it. The bunker had 73 seconds to put Kaufusi on report and they didn’t.
Even the Roosters players in the vicinity thought little of the incident. The contact, the Storm argued, was unavoidable. The panel agreed and Kaufusi avoided a fine. More importantly, his record remained clean.
“It is a combat sport, it is a physical sport,” Slater said.
“We’re not talking about Daniel Tupou elbowing Pat Carrigan in the throat [in State of OriginI] are we? I am not saying we should be.
“Things happen in the game. It is a physical, combat sport. We pick and choose, that’s all.”
Where Kaufusi is concerned, the first instinct among many is to lean towards the negative. To consider him guilty before innocent. His personality shouldn’t have any impact on whether he is charged or not, but it should when it comes to the public commentary over his character.
“He is incredibly popular with the players,” Storm head of football Frank Ponissi said.
“He is a real team man. He has a great sense of humour and mixes with the young blokes as much as the old blokes. His wife is a legend — she looks after all the partners and events. You could not get a more popular player in our team.”
Did NRL judiciary get Kaufusi call right?
-Fatima Kdouh
Felise Kaufusi has successfully cleared his name at the NRL judiciary after the Melbourne Storm forward was charged for elbowing Sydney Roosters youngster Sam Walker.
Kaufusi was able to convince the judiciary that the contact his arm made with Walker’s face was accidental and he escaped what would have been a $2,500 fine.
The two-man judiciary panel of Tony Puletua and Bob Lindner deliberated for just over 10 minutes before making a decision. Kaufusi, who appeared via video link, argued the contact was not deliberate, in a hearing that lasted around an hour.
Kaufusi found himself under the spotlight again after the match review committee charged the forward with grade one dangerous contact on Walker in the Storm’s 26-18 win over the Roosters.
Walker was trying to tackle Kaufusi and as the pair fell to the ground Kaufusi’s arm struck the Roosters playmaker in the face.
It is the second time this season the MRC has charged Kaufusi with grade one dangerous contact. In round six, Kaufusi pleaded guilty and was fined $1000 for a late shot on former Storm teammate Nicho Hynes.
In March last year, Kaufusi was banned for two weeks when he slammed his forearm into the head of Parramatta star Ryan Matterson, who was carrying the ball, in an attempt to make a tackle. Matterson was left concussed and spent five weeks on the sideline after the hit.
Immediately after the Walker incident on the weekend, Fox League commentator Greg Alexander said Kaufusi had form, referencing the Matterson incident: “He does have history. Do you think he moved that elbow? Okay, I’ll say it, I think he meant what we saw. He knew exactly what he was doing.”
At the time, the NRL was criticised for taking a light-handed approach to the dangerous tackle, with some commentators arguing Kaufusi should have spent up to eight weeks on the sidelines.
The Redcliffe-bound forward also copped a one-week ban for a careless high tackle on then Penrith centre Matt Burton in round 20 last season.
Before that, Kaufusi was charged with tripping Brisbane’s Jake Turpin and was set to miss the opening match of the 2021 State of Origin series.
But the veteran forward was able to successfully argue at the judiciary that the contact with Turpin was accidental and was free to play for Queensland in game one.
NRL MRC has failed the victim again
-Paul Kent
If we can marvel at the athletic precision of Dallin Watene-Zelezniak, working with about six inches of field and shrinking, identifying Ronaldo Mulitalo coming across in cover, leaping high into the air — over the top of Mulitalo! the goldythroats say — all while holding the ball in one hand and finding the in-goal area with little room to spare, then why can’t Felise Kaufusi fall properly?
In all that available field, he drops an elbow on Sam Walker’s head, nowhere else to land.
Maybe Kaufusi is just clumsy.
The argument that we can marvel at one form of athleticism when it suits, and completely overlook another when it carries a whisper of thuggery, is a ridiculous one, but one the protectors of the game ask us too often to commit.
What it does do is highlight the inconsistency of the match review committee, whose members ignore the very reason they were hired in the first place: to bring a player’s understanding of what happens on the field.
Too often they side with the aggressor, not the victim.
There once was a time when the judiciary was prepared to get it wrong to get it right, which is not the recommended method but found more satisfied customers than this current version has a chance of seeing.
After a summer spent reshaping the judiciary, which included wiping everybody’s priors in some misguided sense they were all starting again, the match review committee still remains as out of touch as ever.
It is time to reduce the influence of players on the committee to introduce former coaches, who are less inclined to be guided by the Players’ Old Mates Act, and referees, who understand what the rules are actually there for and how they should be adjudicated.
This current crop is awful.
Kaufusi was charged with a grade one dangerous contact when he concussed Sam Walker by dropping his elbow onto his head Saturday night. Once the elbow was in place early in the tackle, and it became clear Kaufusi was coming down on top of him, Kaufusi made no effort to shift it from Walker’s head.
No marvellous athleticism on his part.
A day later Brent Naden spear tackled Jake Trbojevic and the judiciary deemed it worthy of a five-week penalty, four with an early plea.
Both incidents could have been life changing.
Yet the match review committee, which has lost its way despite its overhaul, does not understand its role in discouraging acts of foul play by actioning charges strong enough to act as a deterrent.
The big picture is lost.
Walker is one of the bright new stars of the game, one of those young players the NRL quickly points to when the time comes to promote the game or what it can do for today’s youth.
He won’t be for much longer, though, if the NRL continues to allow thugs to take cheap shots at him like Kaufusi did Saturday night.
The decision to fight the charge is a difference of $700 in fines for Kaufusi and the Storm.
It raises the question whether the challenge is less about the consequences than it is about protecting his reputation, and to avoid Walker becoming part of a growing number of Kaufusi victims like Ryan Matterson and Boyd Cordner, the latter now retired with head fog. That’s in no way to suggest Kaufusi’s hit contributed to that outcome.
Would the Storm and Kaufusi be as willing to fight the charge if there were games at stake rather than a measly $700? The Storm spend this much each week on tape.
The strict processes, the firm gradings, the comparable incidents, all were designed to bring consistency to the NRL’s judicial system.
But, like the old system, it fails because there is still human error. Under this system, though, an injustice can’t be corrected because the restrictions around the process are too tight.
So it is with some relief that the quiet whisper from the weekend reveals that moves are afoot to bring some discretion back to the judicial process.
It reminds a few greybeards of the time many years back when a player with a notorious reputation was charged with a high tackle and it took just a cursory look at the video to see that the player had suffered a rare miss with his swinging arm.
ARL Commissioner Alan Sullivan was on the judiciary back then, more to provide expert legal advice and ensure the deliberation was carried out in the correct manner than to weigh in on the outcomes.
By definition he was there to cast the deciding vote in the case of a deadlock between the two former players, although he always claimed he was never needed.
One night, though, he went off to convene with the two former players and after a short deliberation the pair decided the player was guilty.
This went against everything Sullivan and his two offsiders just saw and heard in the hearing.
Every different angle submitted for inspection showed the player had missed, as much of a turnaround for him that this appeared to be.
“How can you find him guilty?” Sullivan asked. “The video clearly shows he missed.”
“Yeah,” said one of the players, prepared to get it wrong to get it right, “but he does it every week.”
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