NRL 2024: Storm-Roosters game exposes referees’ ‘close enough is good enough’ attitude | Paul Kent

The NRL is refereed more like an entertainment business than a sport nowadays, where nothing matters as long as the fans are excited. And the Storm-Roosters game exposed the game’s ‘close enough is good enough’ attitude, writes PAUL KENT.

WEB kent column on NRL rules. artwork by boo bailey

Beneath the party balloons and confetti that have rained down on this NRL season, all this high praise about this magnificent season we are witnessing, there comes an itch that won’t go away.

How much of it is being manufactured?

The NRL has a She’ll Be Right, Mate attitude towards its own rules.

The game seems to be refereed more like an entertainment than a sport nowadays, where so long as the fans are excited and the acrobatics are on display it doesn’t matter what happens much anymore.

This change in approach happened to professional wrestling years back until the sport could no longer lie to itself anymore – and a famous court case where it was forced to admit results are pre-decided – and so the atomic pile-driver was no longer regarded as quite the athletic feat we all believed. Such are boyhood hearts broken.

What appears lost in the NRL’s thinking is that sport doesn’t always provide a just result, and isn’t even always exciting, but wins are earned.

Yet more and more in the NRL we seem expected to overlook officiating mistakes because the shrill voices are tripping over their tongues telling us it provided an exciting outcome.

Close enough is good enough, it seems, if it gets the fans jumping.

WEB kent column on NRL rules. artwork by boo bailey

Exhibit A was there Thursday night when Melbourne’s Eliesa Katoa bullocked over for a try that pushed the Storm ahead by six points and, ultimately, may have won them the match.

Roosters coach Trent Robinson later showed some of the confusion we all had.

“It’s really clear. The rules are really clear,” Robinson said.

“The rules came out at the end of the year and if you lend weight to a tackler in stationary or forward momentum, then it’ll either be stopped or, if it’s in a try scoring situation, it’ll be a penalty.

“It’s really simple. He runs in, he lends weight, touches his player and (Michael) Jennings.

“Did he lend weight to the play? Yes he did. It’s not that hard. It was really clear.”

Robinson pointed out that NRL general manager Graham Annesley will probably correct the mistake at Monday’s Weekly Confessional, where the ongoing theme is all sins are absolved with three Hail Marys and two Our Fathers and on we go until the next stuff up.

What he will say is that Robinson did not get it exactly right, that the rules provide for interpretation.

The rule says it is “not permissible for a player out players to lend weight to a teammate in possession to gain advantage in a tackle”.

Nelson Asofa-Solomona clearly leaned on Katoa and also Jennings.

Yet the rule contains a subclause, the get-out clause.

The subclause states: “The referee will take into consideration any momentum the tackle has already generated”, which is where the Storm seem to have got the pass.

The problem with that explanation is Asofa-Solomona lends his weight kind of like a small building might lend its weight. He is capable of causing an eclipse.

NRL 2024 RD07 Sydney Roosters v Melbourne Storm – Eliesa Katoa, try, celeb

For some reason the game is happy being managed rather than officiated. There might be no other game in the world that has sacrificed its own rules for the alternative, how we feel about the rules. Aside from wrestling, of course.

So a solid hoof presses down the bubble in the carpet on one side and it pops up in another.

A game with barely any contested possessions was created.

Scrums became a group cuddle where the ball is rolled in and old rules like second-row feed or feet across the scrum were politely ignored.

Stripping the ball in the tackle can be done only under certain conditions, like when the wind blows a nor’-easter and fans are whistling Sweet Caroline. Markers can no longer rake the ball. Feet are no longer required to roll the ball back in the play-the-ball.

The changes were effectively made to eliminate any contest which might bog down the action, thereby making the game faster.

Eventually, suggests the evidence, they want to turn the NRL into a track meet.

It might make the game more attractive to the fan that is new to the game, but the rusted on fans wrinkle their busted noses and wonder what’s happened to the game they knew.

The contest is increasingly missing from the contest.

Coaches work as hard to exploit the loophole in a rule rather than coach to it.

How long it can be sustained is the question nobody can answer.

The last thing the NRL needs, though, is for the game to become unexplainable like happens in rugby union.

Earlier this year the NRL invaded Las Vegas like a dosed up bachelor party, filling bars and strip clubs in equally pleasing numbers.

The US excursion was as much about awakening the 400 million or so people in America that our game has a little more than something on their game and, if the NRL could convince them to be interested, then maybe they could have a little of theirs on this game of ours.

In other words, start punting on the game.

More than creating a US satellite team for the NRL, or one day taking over the NFL which some have ridiculously promoted, the big win for the NRL is the millions to be made if only the Americans could get interested enough to bet.

But how does the game explain Thursday night to some poor Pittsburgh coalminer who falls in love with the toughness of the game and then rises from his bed early one morning only to see his multi is gone at the first leg overnight because somebody in the bunker didn’t deem the weight applied by some skyscraper was heavy enough to interfere with the tackle.

Nobody forced Asofa-Solomona to get involved, he might argue.

So if a rule was a rule …

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Something to think about for the theorists …

Recent support has arisen for an idea being pushed by Buzz Rothfield.

Namely, it goes, about the unfairness of two teams walking off losers in the NRL.

In one, the team is beaten by 60 points, barely even a contest, and gets zero competition points for their efforts, and some might say rightfully so.

Another team walks off having lost in golden point and, some argue, they are worthy of at least something given their valiant effort.

So the idea proposed and recently being pushed by Buzz is for competition points to be worth four a game, with a golden point winner getting three points, a golden point loser getting one point, and the everyday loser getting zero.

There are some holes in Buzz Rothfield’s fix to golden point, writes Paul Kent. Picture: Getty Images

This, goes the suggestion, fixes an inherent unfairness in the game.

Until we get to a scenario like this:

Last round, a team running equal eighth plays the competition leaders in the final round and bravely wins in golden point, getting three points for their efforts.

Across town, the other team running equal eighth canters home against the wooden spooners and qualifies for the semis based on the fact they played an easier team in the last round and got the full four points available.

In this case, the “unfairness” of extra time simply flips the other way.

Won’t there be some screaming then.

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With punters chasing their money the way they do, in this world of responsible gambling, of course, the UPC showdown might be the safest and most responsible way yet to stay interested in a day on the punt without doing all your dough.

Last week’s winner Dayne, for instance, paid the $50 entry fee and walked away with $31,355.

Punters just have to pick the winner in 12 selected races and their prices are tallied at the end of the day, the biggest winner collecting the prize.

At odds of better than 600-1, it’s like the punter’s lotto.