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Here’s a riddle for you: When is a penalty not a penalty? When you get time to reset your defensive line and your opposition doesn’t score as a result.
Steps must be taken to stop the game descending into a dreary display of wrestling, playing offside, putting hands on the ball and players lying all over the ruck.
The proliferation of these negative tactics poses a big problem for the National Rugby League and one that it must fix or risk losing its audience to more dynamic sports.
As I said in August last year, the sin bin is the obvious way to stop sides using negative tactics.
The new NRL referees boss Tony Archer must instruct his whistleblowers to use the sin bin far more frequently than they presently do. Penalties alone are clearly not providing nearly enough disincentive.
While many of the Roosters and Manly fans took great issue with my thoughts at the time, since then a number of respected minds – including Wayne Bennett, Peter Sterling and Darren Lockyer – have all acknowledged these negative tactics are successful because slowing the play down, even if it means conceding a penalty, allows time for your defensive line to reset. Many sides back their line to hold as long as their players are in position and ready.
On Sunday evening, I had the misfortune of witnessing the Titans versus Raiders in Canberra. It was a dreadful match, which featured almost no dynamic play at all.
I love hard-fought, trench warfare, no-quarter-given-and-none-asked footy. There was no way this match could be vaguely confused for that.
The Raiders were very poor, in large part because the Titans were allowed to engage in all the above described negative tactics as their standard operating procedure.
Adrian Warren, writing in the Fairfax press, tried to sell the match as “Heroic Titans overhaul Canberra”, but anyone who actually watched the game could be forgiven for thinking Adrian was on the magic mushrooms that grow so well around Canberra. Either he was hallucinating or he thinks “heroic” means ‘to engage in grubby tactics’.
What we actually witnessed was a Titans side looking to atone by any means necessary for the flogging they’d endured the previous week. And their means were negative, boring rubbish. Then John Cartwright and his boys took the two points and went home.
That’s all they wanted. They really couldn’t care that they’d destroyed the entertainment value of the game for the spectators. Their two tries from dummy half and the two tries to Albert Kelly at the death, off the back of desperate ‘Hail Mary’ plays from the Raiders, were hardly highlight worthy.
However, I can assure you that Cartwright, Nate Myles, Greg Bird and Co. will not worry about that.
The key word in ‘winning ugly’ is ‘winning’. It is the goal in this fiercely competitive league. You achieve it any way you can and no coach has ever been sacked for winning. So coaches and players will always try and get away with as much as they can.
Therefore it is the referees who must dictate how the game will be played. On Sunday night, referees Gavin Badger and Brett Suttor penalised the Titans 15 times and there could have been five more too, given the low-rent tactics Nate Myles and his charges resorted to.
The average penalties given for an entire game – i.e. conceded by both sides combined – so far this season is 15 and the Titans managed that number all by themselves. Five times the Gold Coast were penalised for being offside in defence. Eight times the Titans were penalised for play the ball infringements.
Badger and Suttor failed all those watching at the ground and on TV because they did not put any of the Titans players in the sin bin, even though they had more than enough justification for doing it. The Titans strangled the life out of the game and the referees effectively let them.
How Brad Takarangi didn’t get sent to the bin for a blatantly deliberate offside play that stopped an almost certain try, which he then compounded by throwing the ball away when the penalty was called, was absolutely mystifying.
How David Mead stayed on the park after clearly and deliberately blocking Jarrod Croker’s contest for a bomb was almost as confusing. Neither did Mark Minichello go for personally giving away three penalties in the second half.
There were 10 penalties given away by the Titans’ right-side defence, yet neither Suttor nor Badger put one of the perpetrators in the bin. These spoiling tactics meant the “heroic” Titans held their line.
Just before halftime, Badger did call Myles over and warn soon he was going to have to send one of his players to the bin if they kept infringing. In a bizarre response, Myles said, “send one of the centres off because they can’t f@#king tackle anyway.”
This must have shocked Badger, as he forgot his threat and let the Titans continue their cheating without any real consequence for the rest of the game.
Myles probably knew Badger’s threat was hollow, as the sin bin has been used less than 15 times since the start of the 2013 season.
While Super Rugby has its own issues – such as getting mired down in continual scrummaging – they know how to bin. When the ACT Brumbies in the ‘90s were seen to be routinely spoiling in defence, preferring to give away three points rather than seven, SANZAR went hard with yellow cards and the practice quickly dried up.
Super Rugby is very aware that people want to see a spectacle and they use their sin bin routinely to stomp out gamesmanship. Already this season, there have been 32 yellow cards given out over 33 games.
However, there have been only two players sent to the sin bin in the 24 NRL matches played so far this season. So the referees have considered only 0.5 per cent of the 366 penalties conceded so far this year to be professional fouls.
It would appear the NRL’s interpretation of a professional foul is just short of aggravated armed robbery. Mostly, players only get binned these days for acts that should be – but rarely are – accompanied by the awarding of a penalty try.
As a result of the referees’ toothless approach, teams routinely cheat. The worst indictment of this is that the 2013 NRL grand final was contested by the two biggest cheats of the year.
Manly and the Roosters gave away easily the most penalties of all the sides in the NRL and their reward was to play off for the title. Both sides won lots of matches during 2013 where they clearly lost the penalty count but neither ever went a man down to the bin.
The Roosters were at it again last Friday night, narrowly winning a match although they lost the penalty count 10-3.
Is this actually acceptable to David Smith and his team? Or have they just not noticed?
So forget trys and tackle breaks, right now an accurate TV ad for the game should feature images of (to name just a few regular offenders) Jake Friend and Ashley Harrison performing double tackles; Cam Smith and Beau Scott wrestling players onto their backs; Matt Ballin, Josh Reynolds and James Maloney with their hands all through the play the ball; a montage of Anthony Watmough, Shaun Fensom, Michael Ennis, Adam Blair, Isaac Luke and Simon Mannering performing third-man flops; and a myriad of centres and wingers blocking players from contesting kicks.
Sadly, all those actions are becoming emblematic of today’s NRL. And those things aren’t good. They make for boring matches. They make for a crap sport.
The NRL needs to stamp them out immediately. And all they have to do is send the cheats to the bin!