Saddened! wrote:
Good to see a Warrington fan seeing the issue with that, most on Twitter just going with 'nowt wrong with it'. It's something that in the rules players can do, so I'm not sure what the disciplinary can do. Actually I'm sure they will do absolutely nothing as he's done it several times in the past and nothing happened then either. If you look at the NRLs crackdown on head contacts and compare to Super League, we simply cannot be claiming any sort of commitment to player welfare if that kind of contact is legal, it could quite easily be fatal. Whilst we don't want to lose the physical nature of the sport, we don't want to see that kind of impact either. He's almost stationary and Akuola 100% targets his head and the force is all applied directly to the head. I fully acknowledge that McCarthy's technique could be better and he should be approaching the tackle differently, but there is also an onus on the ball carrier to go into contact safely. Imagine if juniors started doing that, aiming to put the shoulder into the tackler's face, it'd be carnage, especially given the size mismatches you get in kids RL. I've got a lad spamming me with DMs on Twitter saying he's the hardest forward ever and I need to shut up because he can knock players out. But you never saw Adrian Morley shouldering people in the head whilst carrying the ball, nor Webcke, nor Ward.
If Akuola made that impact as a defender he'd get the biggest ban you can get in RL and you'd probably never see him play the sport again. We can't have that discrepancy. The rule already exists that you can't raise the elbow into the face of a tackler, I'd just extend it to say you can't promote the shoulder into the head either. Simple rule change, very easy to rule on. There would only have been a few times to penalise it in recent seasons and they would all have involved the same player.
Yet again, your complete bias against Warrington is shining through, by suggesting this.
