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After making through the summer doldrums with no rugby league to watch, the NRL is finally back. [Painting by James Brennan]
Having followed the game since I was a kid on the Paddo Hill at the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1961, I have seen the evolution of rugby league.
I must admit, I don’t like what I am seeing these days. I have come to the conclusion that today’s rugby league is a dumbed-down version of what the game used to be.
Let’s go back a couple of decades to the eighties. The Tina Turner era if you like.
What have we lost since then? Some may say, “not much”, but look carefully at some video of the matches featuring players like Benny Elias, Steve Roach, Terry Lamb, Mal Meninga and Wally Lewis. A comparison to the modern game raises several questions.
How do we have scrums like they are today? Why has the skill of raking the ball at the ruck been obliterated? Where is the sweeping backline play of the great Parramatta teams of their premiership era?
What has become of the specialist hooker? Why do so many players play the ball as if they were playing touch football? Where are the practised moves that broke defensive lines? None of these things are evident today.
So what do we have instead? Scrums that are nothing more than twelve blokes bending over – and sometimes they are unable to even do that! Witness how long it takes to form a scrum today. You can hear the referee telling first grade players how to pack!
The ball used to be fed into the tunnel between the front rowers. The skill of the hooker, in combination with his half-back, has been eroded. Now, anybody can be a hooker. You can’t strike for the ball when it’s fed in behind the second row. How did league fans allow this to happen?
While I blame league authorities and referees, mostly I blame the media for this travesty. In the days when scrum penalties were issued for breaches of the scrummaging rules, the media would focus on the amount of penalties given in a match.
Wrongly they would blame the referees for “not allowing the game to flow.” But the referees were not to blame – the players were the ones responsible for these penalties. I do not recall too many media outlets blasting certain hookers or scrum-halves of those days for persistently trying to flout the rules.
If the refs ‘pinged’ them, surely the players (and coaches?) should have got the message. The call to let the game flow has now come to the point that rugby league is little more than touch football, but with full-on body contact.
Oh, and a thing called a scrum – but we don’t really know what’s for any more, do we?
Let me move now to the part of rugby league that is causing more problems than it should: the ten metre rule. This was designed to open up the game. While it has done that to a degree, it has also taken the creativity out of the game.
It has also caused a huge number of problems for referees and players at the ruck area. Players used to make an effective tackle (sometimes even one-on-one) and jump up to act as dummy-half without a problem. Why? Because his team mates did not have to retire so far behind the play the ball area.
I used to see the three yard rule in action. I loved the game back then. It worked. Then it became the five yard rule and that too was ok as it did not alter the game much. When it became ten metres, many things changed.
Coaches understandably got their players to wrestle or hold the opposition to the ground to deliberately slow things down, enabling the defensive line to set. You can’t blame them for this. You can blame the administrative ‘genius’ who thought the ten metre rule would be a good idea.
That decision now sees players lying all over a tackled player, making no effort to get off until the referee tells the players to move.
Since the rule change, we’ve had complaints about grapple tackling, chicken wings, chin strap tackles, dominant tackles (a stupid concept, that is) and clubs have employed wrestling coaches to train players to get the opposition onto their backs in the tackle.
None of this would be necessary if the offside rule was brought back to five metres. Maybe we could even have backlines that stood deep in attack to give them time to perform, wait for it, a backline move! Remember those?
I am not giving up on rugby league. Yet. It has always been a great game to watch but I am sick and tired of watching of incorrect play-the-balls go unpunished, of watching bastardised versions of ‘scrums’ pack down, of watching players running backwards in ‘defence’, of watching players lying all over the tackled player to slow things down and of watching players who do not have a clue what to do when a ball is dropped.
I also remember St George Illawarra, in last year’s finals, standing around and watching the ball bounce after a high kick. This is happening all too often in the modern game. It was unthinkable to do that in days gone by.
Today’s rugby league is in bad shape as a game of skill.
Yes, the players are bigger, yes, they might be fitter, yes, the hits are enormous, but the player of yesteryear had more skill.
And as for making games more amenable to television advertising? Well, don’t even get me started on that one!
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