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Let me sketch a slightly different end to the weekend’s St George-Wests cliff-hanger. Let’s imagine the game played with a slight rule change, to the effect that any time the ball is not in play the clock does not run.
The Tigers have surged down the right touchline, kicked ahead, only to see the ball made dead by the Dragons. There are twenty seconds to go. What now?
Well, with our new rule one thing that does not happen is what did happen on Saturday night; the Dragons do not start celebrating with time still on the clock.
Instead, the Tigers take up their positions for receiving the goal-line dropout but now with the obvious possibility of setting themselves for a leveling field goal.
The Dragons have an interesting choice. Do they kick long? This would maximize the distance of any field goal attempt. Then again, Marshall has been kicking 50-metre plus dropouts all night so a long restart might simply present Benji with a free and uncontested shot at taking the game to extra-time.
So, with Marshall in position, say, in the middle of the field, perhaps St George should kick towards either touch line. But this is risky; kick the ball out on the full and Wests have a shot at penalty goal from in front of the posts to win.
Perhaps a better tactic would be to kick short and then contest the drop of the ball, thus making any field goal attempt much more rushed and pressured.
But there are risks here as well; a fluffed short dropout might fail to go ten metres and, again, result in a penalty. And if the Tigers field it cleanly close to the line there might actually be time for them to run two plays before the siren.
As the rules stand, this mother of all grandstand finishes is denied to us; the Dragons simply ignore the clock, start congratulating themselves, and rather than a game of 80 minutes we get a game of 79 minutes and 40 seconds.
Time-wasting is a problem in rugby league, rugby union and soccer football. In league we have an array of ridiculous band-aid solutions.
The circus that ensues around the packing of scrums when one team wants to get on with it and the other doesn’t is plain silly.
Worse still, the thirty second time limit before line dropouts is completely arbitrary and probably has the opposite effect than the one intended. Rather than making teams take dropouts quickly it encourages them to use the full length of time allowed.
In fact, teams now routinely stand around taking a breather before goal line dropouts and wait for the referee to tell them when time is up, a classic case of the unintended consequence.
While not completely absent, time-wasting is very difficult in other sports where rules don’t allow it.
For example, although I’m no great fan of the sport, extraordinary last-second thrillers happen quite regularly in basketball because the clock simply does not run when the ball is not in play. The game must be played down to the final second, sometimes fractions of a second.
This is essentially also true in Australian rules. In fact, the example here is even more interesting because the changes to AFL time-keeping are fairly recent and offer a clear solution to the time-wasting problem in other football codes.
In essence, the AFL rule makers decided to nominate the number of minutes per quarter of actual football they wanted.
At the time, I remember thinking that 20 minutes per quarter seemed a bit skinny. But, of course, stopping the clock for all stoppages in play resulted in not much difference to actual game running time.
The beauty of the change, though, was that it meant no advantage could be gained from slow kick-ins after behinds were scored nor from getting up slowly before contesting restart bounces.
I struggle to see why this shouldn’t be the case in rugby league.
To begin with, the clock should stop as soon as the ball is signaled out by touch judges and not start again until the ball is fed into the scrum.
The same goes for the moment the whistle is blown for knock-ons, penalties, tries and when the ball is made dead in-goal. Once a try is scored, for example, time should not start again until the next kick-off.
Under this system it would still be possible to penalise teams for slow play if we wanted to. Referees could award penalties against teams that took too long to form a scrum or restart from a goal line dropout.
Goal kickers could take as much or as little time as we allowed them to, with the obvious difference that no advantage would be gained from even the most elaborate or elongated pre-kick routine.
Apart from the obvious, this system would have the advantage of completely relieving referees from any time-keeping responsibilities. They wouldn’t need to hurry people up or signal time-off and time-on, something that presently happens in a totally haphazard and inconsistent fashion.
But the killer point here, I think, is that time wasting robs fans. When soccer goal-keepers preen themselves endlessly before taking goal kicks or when league teams decide to ‘run the clock down’ by taking a shot at goal, they are cheating us, the spectators.
Time wasting also takes the pressure off players. It gives them an easy out and if there is something common to all sports, it is that the most thrilling moments happen when players are forced to act under pressure. This is what we pay to see.
When St George flatly refused to restart play last Saturday night, they avoided having to think their way through a potentially intriguing and explosive final act. A cliché, yes, but the game was the loser.
Let’s decide how much football makes a game of rugby league. Let’s begin with a number, say two halves of 30 minutes, and see how it goes. My understanding of the research in this area is that halves of 30 ball-in-play minutes would deliver more football than we currently get.
But if it’s too much, make it less. Maybe 25 or 28 is the right number. Surely we are adult enough to see that there is nothing magical or sacred about the number 40?
This kind of rule change would also improve both union and soccer, a sport that continues in the 21st century to be dogged by controversies over playing time.
But for all of us, regardless of code, football fans would see many more hair raising finishes, and players would have to think their way through pressure more often, because time wasting would simply be much, much harder to do.
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