Kent: Time for NRL referees to be braver and better when players don’t obey rules
Abandon the scrum? Make the referees feed the ball? It’s all useless, writes Paul Kent. If the NRL wants to fix its issues he has a bold idea — use the whistle when players don’t obey rules. Simple, right?
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Once again the NRL is using a hatchet to swat a fly.
The over-reaction to the scrum, which includes any call to abandon the scrum altogether or — just to show they have lost the plot completely — make referees feed the ball, are all countered by the referees’ inability to make brave decisions in the first place.
It is, quite literally, the Catch-22 paradox.
Why is the NRL now considering changing the rules — to fix the rules that the players don’t obey anyway?
Yet they expect the new rules to work in this strange new world.
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Here’s a novel idea: why not penalise teams if they pack four players into the front row, instead of three as the rules state, or penalise them if they don’t bind properly, or if they collapse under the gentle pressure of the defending team pushing against them, or if they break early, or leave the scrum early, or …
All of these options are already in the rules but have been allowed to disintegrate under the strange idea that we want the game to “flow” — to the point the rules are now basically useless because the clubs don’t play to them and the referees don’t enforce them.
So how do new rules fix this?
It gets worse.
New rules won’t make the referees braver or better and they need to be both.
Until then, more rules or changes to the rules are pointless.
Already there were alarming signs over the weekend that the referees are once again being left behind by teams being coached outside the rules.
Wrestling is creeping back in, the coaches winning the attrition war with the referees by simply telling their players to keep wrestling and holding for tackle after tackle, knowing the referees don’t have the stones to penalise each infraction on its merits.
Referee Chris Butler watched the Warriors pack four into the front-row on Friday. What rule change can fix that, when a non-discretional penalty happens a metre in front of the referee?
Rule changes do not fix the Catch-22 paradox.
If the referees don’t adjudicate the rules, new rules won’t fix that problem.
Until then, everything else is irrelevant.
The referees need to get back to officiating the game as the rules state.
That might be a good start.
Melbourne exploited the lack of strength from the referees by going down injured at dropouts on the weekend and, when ordered to restart play, Cameron Smith argued Ryley Jacks was down injured.
Jacks was being strapped. And Smith was buying time.
Penalty for a professional foul.
Latrell Mitchell objected to Josh Reynolds striking for the ball, which kicked Campbell Graham in the head and saw him charged with dangerous contact. So Mitchell struck him across the jaw, from behind, splitting his lip.
It was not only striking, which resulted in a charge against Mitchell, it was also third man in, which was always an automatic sin bin.
But nope.
Teams are wrestling again, already prepared to concede one six-again because they are correctly gambling, under the law of diminishing returns, the referees won’t give another one so soon after the previous.
Coaches are privately complaining about the discrepancy between referees in calling six-again, complaining some are too high.
Not one has whinged that perhaps the others are not high enough. Why? Because they want the licence to wrestle, so better to pressure the referees to stop calling them.
Scrums can be an ugly part of the game
Nobody wants a return to the old days where screams were packed and forced to repack and repack until the ball finally made it in.
But there was a time when the scrums worked perfectly but, in the relaxing of laws, it has been allowed to go too far.
The referees are weakening and, if rules can’t be enforced by referees, or won’t be enforced, then the referee should be sacked. Not a new rule created to overcome their failings.
As for referees feeding a scrum, that would be a disaster.
Too many scrums would end in debate as to whether the feed was fair. The moment a crucial scrum went against the feed demons from hell would be let loose.
And as for a return to the old scrum, nobody wants to revisit that.
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When the Kangaroos were wrapping up the third Test in 1990 Australian coach Bob Fulton sent a message to Steve Roach with 10 minutes left in the series.
“Time to square up,” the trainer told Roach.
For almost all the series the Kangaroos had kept their cool while Great Britain tried to upset them with niggling tactics. British halfback Andy Gregory was lucky to escape manslaughter charges by the end.
So as they walked to a final scrum Roach looked at halfback Ricky Stuart and nodded towards Gregory.
“Push him in,” Blocker said.
“What?” said Stuart.
“When he goes to feed the ball, push him in the scrum.”
Stuart shoved Gregory into the tunnel where he landed at Blocker’s feet.
By the time Blocker was finished all that was left of Gregory was the left eyebrow and the tongue of his shoe.
They called it even.
Originally published as Kent: Time for NRL referees to be braver and better when players don’t obey rules