Superted wrote:
See this is where we go wrong in rugby league, on both sides of the world. Instead of dealing with isolated issues, we put 'blanket' fixes in place with little/No thought of how it will affect the game, no consideration of the unintended consequences.
We used to have acts of thuggery, cheap shots, coward punches, so what we did is ban fighting completely. We should simply have cracked down on the thuggery with huge bans.
Whilst agreeing with the vast majority of your post it's this bit that I want to focus on.
Your absolutely spot on but it doesn't just apply to the biff element of our game.
We have a problem with time wasting in our game.
Instead of penalizing time wasting we now have rules for conversions, penalties, drop outs, scrums that say you get x amount of time for this then we stop the clock, if you throw the ball away we stop the clock, if you pack down with the wrong number of players we stop the clock.
99% of the time that's what the offending team want.
What they should do is just penalise them and get on with the game. They soon stop doing it.
How many times do you see all teams pack down with 5 men, ref stops game, someone walks 30 metres to join the pack and half way across one of the 5 gets out and walls away pretending the 6th player is there to replace them and we have another minute of messing around. Props don't put their heads in and we stop the clock.
Simple, if you don't pack down with right number of players or correctly it's a penalty.
Drop outs, why do teams throw the ball away? Because they want a rest and take as long as possible to do out. What do we do? Give them seconds then stop the clock and then we wait forever for them to take it as at least the clocks stopped. No, 20 seconds then if you don't take it is a penalty.
The game is 90% good, there's a problem with 1 aspect of the game and we bring a"directive" our rule in and it makes the 90% of the game that was good, worse!
Believe it or not I know a referee and he told me they'd been sent an email from Ganson (this was about may) asking why the game was going the way it was and what did they think they could propose.
I picked 3 things and this was one of them.
(I won't bore you with the other 2, unless you want me too).