Paul Kent: The NRL must act to end the grapple tackle “arms race”

Hip drops, chicken wings and crocodile rolls, they all have one source and one intent – to injure. Paul Kent exposes the history of harm and asks when does it stop?

The Storm are masters of the dark art of the grapple. Art: Boo bailey

He came armed with an apology and reason.

Michael Robertson was the man everybody wanted to talk to Friday morning after the match review committee he presides over saw nothing worth charging in Cameron Munster’s tackle on Penrith’s Spencer Leniu even though the tackle drew tremendous boos from the Penrith crowd at the time.

“My phone’s been running hot,” said Robertson.

He spent Friday trying to explain what he and his committee saw that the Penrith crowd did not, a way to explain not charging a tackle that Penrith coach Ivan Cleary said, more than once, he did not like.

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The Storm are masters of the dark art of the grapple. Art: Boo bailey

Cleary knew the reaction that awaited if he spoke to what most believe they saw, another illegal tackle from Storm colours.

“Don’t ask me,” he said after the game. “I’m not going to answer that question. I just didn’t like it. And it hurt him.”

It is particularly volatile after the opening to the season the Storm have endured.

Felise Kaufusi knocked out Ryan Matterson last round and the Storm reacted like they always do, claiming a conspiracy against them driven by Sydney jealousy. An entire city against them.

It is tissue thin, and hard to believe grown men think so shallowly, but how do you measure paranoia nowadays?

When I responded to Kaufusi’s tackle to say the only way to eliminate dangerous tackles from the game was to suspend the players out of it, and they could start by giving Kaufusi six to eight weeks instead of the much lighter two weeks he got, the Storm coach Craig Bellamy was asked directly about it, as if it was set up, and said it was “ridiculous”.

My response was heavy but based entirely on fact.

For 18 years now the game has struggled with illegal and harmful tackling techniques being coached into the game and, with every scar, the NRL adjusts a ruling to make it illegal but the players just seem to move along to the next one.

They have all kinds of colourful names that hide their intent.

Melbourne always respond to the accusations they tackle dirty with white hot anger. Their jealousy conspiracy is the same as Brisbane Broncos once claimed whenever a decision did not go their way.

This is what happens when people spend too much time in small rooms together. They forget about a whole world out there with too many problems of its own to be bothered sitting around and thinking up reasons to dislike a football team merely because it is based in another city.

Spencer Leniu of the Panthers yells in pain as Cameron Munster (6) rolls on to his leg in a tackle. Picture: Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

What really is certain, though, is that the game has been unhappy with the wrestling techniques that injure players for years but has lacked any real success in eliminating it.

It is becoming generational and now, by the time players make it at the elite level, they are already well-schooled by their wrestling coaches on dangerous tackling techniques.

Where this focus on wrestling began can be traced to 2003 and a lunchtime briefing in the theatre outside the old Sydney Football Stadium.

The NRL organised for Matthew Elliott, then coaching the Raiders, to take a dozen or so league journalists through the game’s new trends, nothing more than an information meeting to stay up to speed with the game’s advances.

What was said in the meeting was to be used for background only. All off the record. Elliott had prepared video of various trends.

After it was over I drove The Sydney Morning Herald’s Roy Masters back to work and, having arrived late, he asked if he missed anything interesting.

He sure did, I said.

Cam Smith chokes Jason Stevens in a grapple tackle.

I told him of these new grapple tackles and of how Elliott said the Storm were dominating in defence because of this wrestling move where they were twisting the opposition’s heads.

Players, feeling the pressure on their necks, were immediately succumbing. Roy’s eyes lit up like all ours did, but it was off the record.

Months later the finals began and the draw worked out so Melbourne played Elliott’s Canberra team in the first week.

I called Elliott early that week to ask if he wanted to go on the record with the Melbourne defence. This was not an unfamiliar tactic.

When it is finals time and they are playing for sheep stations coaches often like to find a mental edge by planting something in the media but Elliott’s response was short and angry. No, it was all off the record, and he meant it. He was offended I would ask.

The next day Melbourne’s new tackling technique was all there in the Herald.

The Daily Telegraph feature story on the Jason Stevens "grapple tackle".

Since then there has been a secret arms race among the clubs to find new techniques and stay ahead of the rules makers.

Tackles have evolved from grapples to chicken wings to crushers to hip drops and each time the NRL bans the tackle a new variation is invented further along the chain.

Robertson said Munster escaped charge Friday because the tackle was not your typical hip drop, where players swivel behind a player and drop their hips with full weight onto the runner’s lower legs, which does awful things to ankles trapped underneath.

“Munster was sliding down his leg, so he was on the way down already when Leniu stepped back,” he said.

Roberston said Leniu contributed to the tackle by stepping back into it.

“To make a charge we need to deem his action is careless and that he failed in his duty of care,” Robertson said.

They could not argue Munster was careless, given his downward motion and Leniu’s step backwards into danger, and it is almost impossible to argue their logic.

Of course, the tremendous news that comes from the match review committee’s conclusion is that it opens an avenue for future exploration.

Now coaches know they can make the next one look “not typical” and, therefore, be able to drop their roll weight on a ballrunner at great risk to his personal wellbeing and argue they did not breach their duty of care.

Just make it look accidental, a bit like Kaufusi the week before.

They have argued ignorance for years.

Truth is they are all merely shades of ugly grey, which is my point all along. Even with the eight weeks.

Recalibrate, and use the dangerous contact charge that a hip drop comes under, or for anything that looks like it is intended to injure, to put players out for extended periods.

Only then, when the consequence is time on the sideline, will coaches begin coaching it out of the game.

****

THE NRL season began, just three weeks ago, with several familiar storylines, one being the pressure on various high-priced playmakers around the game to justify their price tag.

Some argue it is unfair to heap such pressure on them, arguing “it was the club’s choice to pay them that much”.

And that is true, but you could also argue the player and his agent negotiated up to that price and didn’t take the first offer or even what some might consider the fair offer.

That said, and with the availability of genuine game managers not enough to spread across all 16 clubs, it is hard to understand why South Sydney is so casual in its insistence Reynolds will only remain at the club a year at a time.

The Rabbitohs have told Reynolds they want to negotiate in one-year contracts moving ahead.

Reynolds wants the security of several years.

If some of those clubs currently burdened with highly paid players who have failed to deliver value for money are not thinking to themselves of the transaction staring them in the eye, to shift their playmaker along and get Reynolds in on a like for like dollar contract, then they are crazy.

At this rate Reynolds might secure a contract for well above what he is willing to remain at South Sydney.