‘He can’t just disappear into thin air’: NRL supports Will Kennedy ban and sends warning to players to stop making forceful contact with officials

Players have been put on notice with the NRL supporting the MRC’s decision to charge Will Kennedy for making forceful contact with a referee.

The NRL has warned players that forceful contact with referees will continue to result in suspensions after Sharks fullback Will Kennedy accepted his ban. Picture: Graham Denholm/Getty Images

The NRL has sent a firm warning to clubs that forceful contact with referees will result in suspensions after the Sharks “reluctantly” accepted a one-week ban for fullback Will Kennedy who was charged for running into Adam Gee last week.

Kennedy was facing two weeks on the sidelines if he fought the grade two contrary conduct charge and lost at the judiciary, with Cronulla unwilling to risk losing one of their spine members given they’re already without the injured Nicho Hynes.

There are many fans who feel he did nothing wrong given he was trying to support a break by Kayal Iro but ended up colliding with Gee who stopped in front of him.

But the NRL says the onus is on players to avoid contact, with Kennedy following Melbourne’s Jahrome Hughes who was suspended earlier in the season for making contact with an official.

"Completely accidental"

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There are many fans who feel he did nothing wrong given he was trying to support a break by Kayal Iro but ended up colliding with Gee who stopped in front of him.

But the NRL says the onus is on players to avoid contact, with Kennedy following Melbourne’s Jahrome Hughes who was suspended earlier in the season for making contact with an official.

There have been 11 incidents reviewed since round one of contact with referees in games, with five resulting in charges and one concerning act notice sent to a club, and the message from the NRL is clear that deterrents must be put in place.

“No one is suggesting in any of these cases the players have deliberately tried to harm a referee or take them out. But there is a responsibility on players to avoid contact with referees,” NRL head of football Graham Annesley said.

“The referee has to be somewhere, he can’t just disappear into thin air.

“We have to have rules in place that discourage it from happening. Most charges in our game are for accidental actions. High tackles are not deliberate. Most things that happen in our game are accidents and you still get charged for it.

“No one is saying this is deliberate. But when the outcome is heavy contact like this on match officials, then we can’t just set it aside for saying it is accidental.

“We don’t just set aside a high tackle that hits someone right across the chops and we say it was an accident. We have players falling in tackles, and they get hit high and they still get charged.”

Melbourne’s Jahrome Hughes was suspended earlier this year for pushing a referee.

Annesley stressed that Kennedy hadn’t done anything deliberate, but warned action had to be taken to avoid this sort of thing trickling down the system without penalties in place.

“The referee is in his way, there is no question of that. But we can never get to a stage where we make it permissible to move a referee out of the way, regardless of if he is in the way or not,” he said.

“The referee has to be somewhere on the field, and they also have to be protected.

“We can’t allow a situation where the referee is in the way, so I am going to move him out of the way. We can never get to that.

“The ramifications of that, not just at NRL level... anyone with an axe to grind in a local park, somewhere under the control of the Commission across the country, it’s not very hard to get yourself into a position where you can have the referee between you and the ball or a defender.

“And the next thing you know is there is a collision, and ‘oh sorry it was an accident, you were in the way’.

“We can never get to that stage.”

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Annesley also responded to suggestions Dragons winger Christian Tuipulotu didn’t get the ball down in his side’s win over the Broncos just moments after teammate Mikaele Ravalawa was denied a try because there wasn’t clear evidence to reverse the call.

“In both cases, I think it was completely justifiable for the Bunker to say that they could not, with any certainty, say that a try either had or had not been scored,” he said.

“That’s why we get the referees to make an on field decision, because if you get situations like that where you can’t tell definitively whether the ball had touched the ground or hadn’t touched the ground, we still have to have a decision.

“It would be wrong for the Bunker to have to take a guess on that. The referees are in the best position, they usually get a good look at it, and that’s what they form their initial decision on.”

Originally published as ‘He can’t just disappear into thin air’: NRL supports Will Kennedy ban and sends warning to players to stop making forceful contact with officials