The RFL in its current guise is a master at meaningless management speak. Words like "our partners" is typical of it when talking about other agencies they work with.
I can guarantee Rimmer will say something like, "I respect Mr Carter and his view, he is entitled to it, and we will take all these things on board moving forward as we discuss our future path." It will mean "we don't care what you say. We spent many meetings devising this. We used Powerpoint and everything, and even got the Family Circle biscuits in, not the usual Peak Freans rubbish."
A system is only as good as the rules you put in place within the system. Rimmer is a committee man to his boots. You can tell it from how he comes across. No vision. No vim. A dinosaur from the seventies in spirit.
The disciplinary rules should be general in their tone, not prescriptive. The more general, the more the panel has flexibility to rule on what was dangerous, reckless or deliberate, and take into account innocuous or incidental contact as part and parcel of a contact sport that is getting faster. The more prescriptive, as they are now, the more you put an incident into a tick-box with little flexibility.
It is partly the Ganson mentality of refereeing, where they think we turn up to watch a great example of rule enforcement. It ruins games. The rules are there simply to ensure fairness and safety, but fundamentally it's a sport. The likes of Rimmer and Ganson and are turning the sport into an exercise in rule-enforcement, which isn't the right way.
