Warren Ryan: NRL needs to shoulder blame for high drama
JUST two weeks into the season and we've seen two terrible incidents which I believe with some foresight by administrators could have been avoided.
Craig Wing and Karmichael Hunt, in my view, have been failed by the game.
I pointed to the fact last week that there was no protection rule for a defenceless ball carrier held up in a multiple tackle. As a result, Craig Wing was the victim of a late hit and was badly injured.
A defenceless, grounded man is protected. There's a penalty against a defender who "flops late onto a ball carrier on the ground".
Because there is no comparable "late and dangerous" or "late and reckless" judgement call available to the referee to protect men held up, it will remain a dangerous and exploitable flaw in the rules until it's fixed.
At which point I would hasten to add that I see no problem with a late smother tackle ensuring there is no offload, or even a late tackler who has no obvious violent intent and gets there to assist before the ref calls "held".
Karmichael Hunt's horrific head shot on Roosters five-eighth Braith Anasta could have been avoided, too, if the "visionaries" at headquarters could only divorce themselves from the nonsense that rugby league would be diminished in some way as a tough game if shoulder charges were outlawed.
Quite frankly, they could get rid of them tomorrow and nobody would notice they had disappeared.
Part of Hunt's defence, apart from the fact that Anasta was falling, will be an intended shoulder charge that went wrong. The position of Hunt's arms near his body indicated that he wasn't about to attempt a conventional tackle with arms around the ball carrier.
The point is, though, that if shoulder charges had been outlawed two years ago when the alarm bells were ringing after the Adrian Morley hit on Souths halfback Ben Walker, Hunt wouldn't have been trying to do one.
Understandably, domestic rule changes are not desirable mid-season so as to preserve and standardise what little international competition league actually has.
But it wouldn't be the first time Australia, or England for that matter, made a domestic change and put it up for international approval at a later date.
So the wheels of progress grind very slowly and there's always some bright-spark official cautioning one and all about hasty "knee-jerk reactions", reminding us that league is a tough game and injuries are just part and parcel of it. Here are some excerpts from this column from two years ago. I therefore trust you will understand my contempt for comments about "knee-jerk reactions" in regard to the shoulder charge.
"Common sense takes time to unfurl, but they'll eventually get around to banning the shoulder charge altogether, if not for the fact that it isn't a particularly admirable football skill, but for the reason that the target area is perilously close to the head and the margin for error is small.
"Rugby has wisely banned shoulder charges, so I asked NRL operations manager Graham Annesley why league hadn't done likewise, and he said, 'It's not a debate we've had yet,' at which point one might suggest it's about time the NRL put it on the agenda."
Well, it's two years down the track and I'm not holding my breath, but Blind Freddy could see what was coming when the NRL finally did a Band-Aid job last year and decided that the shoulder was to be included along with the fist, forearm, elbow and upper arm as part of the outlawed weaponry in the matter of striking the head or neck of an opponent.
Talk about getting it half right. What a conundrum! The shoulder has been made part of the illegal weaponry, but the shoulder charge is still in the players' arsenal. How could they fail to see the bleeding obvious? A shoulder charge only has to be slightly off-target or the ball carrier's head drop a fraction and bingo someone's head is almost separated from his shoulders.
The way Anasta's head was snapped back when he was struck, he's lucky his injuries are facial and not spinal. I don't normally go down this road, but countless replays of the Wing and Hunt episodes would make any hesitant parents baulk at the thought of their kids playing the game.
As for diminishing league's tough appeal, the game has never been tougher on the human body than it is today, as evidenced by the long injury lists and the reconstruction operations every year.
What the game doesn't need is any unnecessary additional injuries that could have been avoided with some foresight and protective legislation.
One comment from a mentally challenged club blazer-wearer, in reference to banning shoulder charges, was that "league would become like rugby union". What an analytical masterpiece. Does he really think that's all it would take to make the two codes look similar?
Perhaps the inference there was that the shoulder charge was the sole survivor of the game's Neolithic period and a relic we need to keep as a reminder of the game's brutal past. The same chap would no doubt revel in the reintroduction of stiff arms, biting, eye-gouging and Christmas grips.
Nothing wrong with getting a slight leg up on the opposition.
