NRL 2023: Paul Kent refutes claims players have no choice but to make illegal hip-drop tackles

Paul Kent has had enough of archaic statements like “what’s he supposed to do” in defending dangerous hip-drop tackles. How many legs need to snap before critics change their views?

NRL 2023 RD08 Parramatta Eels v Brisbane Broncos - Reagan Campbell-Gillard Payne Haas, Hip Drop, Report. Picture: NRL Photos

Just the other day Victor Radley, familiar with tough defence and the NRL judiciary equally, was saying the whole hip drop drama was not too hard to figure out at all.

“Just keep your studs in the ground,” he said.

It was a simple solution to a problem causing tremendous confusion around the game.

Radley is one of the game’s great competitors. He knows what he sees, and what he is taught.

Yet the narrative continues around the game that the hip-drop drama, a relatively new tackling technique, is not actually so new at all and that there is no real problem with it.

Jackson Hastings’ leg breaks under a hip drop.

The problem, it goes, is the NRL has suddenly become aware and launched a crackdown.

Try telling that to the likes of Jackson Hastings, whose leg snapped under the unfamiliar pressure of a hip drop last season.

At least some of it looks like wilful denial.

The dogged persistence from some around the game, who really should know better, is that tacklers have no other choice but to make a tackle deemed illegal under the rules.

“What’s he supposed to do in that situation?” Greg Alexander was saying after Parramatta played the Broncos and several players were sent to the sin bin, some were penalised, and three players were ultimately charged.

It is worth noting all three charged out of the game, J’maine Hopgood, Ezra Mam and Payne Haas, all pleaded guilty on Monday to their charges. Whatever defence anybody tried to mount for the trio was gone the moment they were asked to challenge at the judiciary.

CAN’T BE A CHOICE

It should go without saying that if a player has a choice between a hip-drop tackle and the high risk of injury it carries with it, or missing the tackle, then there really is no choice.

If a player has a choice between a shoulder charge or letting a player score in the corner, nobody accepts anymore, except a few old dinosaurs, that the shoulder charge is acceptable.

Parramatta’s Reagan Campbell-Gillard winces in pain after Brisbane prop Payne Haas fell on his leg last week. Picture: NRL Photos

If two or three players have a runner pinned and all the only real estate left is his forehead, nobody would dare suggest the next man would be okay to strike him there, given everywhere else was taken.

In all cases, if a player really does have only those two choices left by the time he goes to make a tackle, one of them illegal, then he has already missed his assignment.

He should not be allowed to commit an illegal tackle.

TAKING A STAND

NRL head of football Graham Annesley finally had enough at his Monday football briefing.

He took a practical approach to some of the impractical thinking around the game, which clearly confuses some.

“This has been an ongoing attempt to get this type of tackle out of the game,” he said.

“In the same way the match-review committee and the NRL over decades now have attempted to rid the game of other actions that are dangerous to players.

“I’m talking about high tackles, spear tackles, punching, we don’t see off-the-ball incidents now as much as we used to see.

NRL general manager of football Graham Annesley.

“All of these things have been effectively addressed, not necessarily completely eliminated, but we need to see the same thing happening with hip drops because at the moment all of the data is heading in the wrong direction.

“It’s not because we’re taking any closer look at these incidents, they just keep happening.

“The referees can’t send players to the sin bin if the incident doesn’t happen. There’s a difference between frustration and confusion. It’s not confusing to understand it.”

And with that the jury rests.

GENESIS OF THE SCOURGE

Where the tackle has come from no one will confess.

Some have tried to suggest it has always been in the game but for some unexplainable reason the game has decided only now to address it.

That is rubbish of course.

Tackling styles are always in development and one of the sure bets is that teams are always several months, if not more, ahead of the commentary around the game as far as technique.

The hands are positioned differently, locked around the waist with one arm gripping the opposite wrist.

Victor Radley has a commonsense approach to the hip-drop scourge. Picture: Matt King/Getty Images

In the old days, the arms were rarely locked, allowing the tackler to slide down the legs and pin the legs together in a tackle that now belongs in the museum, a classic legs tackle.

Now, by the time such a tackle is made most coaches will tell their men in review that they lost that tackle.

In a bid to win back some control jujitsu techniques were introduced. The arms were locked, nobody slid down the legs, so in an attempt to get them down they were initially bent backwards over the defender’s body.

Bones were broken.

ABSURD THAT THEY AREN’T TAUGHT

Now, players are still losing their legs, their studs leaving the ground, so the ballrunner has the full weight of the defender to carry, but have shifted to the side and are no longer peeling defenders backwards over them.

The clubs have been told about it all season long.

Annesley offered an olive branch Monday, trying to give the players an out by saying it could be muscle memory but the players need to respond and change.

While nobody is saying players are deliberately trying to hurt their rivals, this idea that it is all new and not taught is absurd.

Originally published as NRL 2023: Paul Kent refutes claims players have no choice but to make illegal hip-drop tackles