- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
The terrible spectre of ruthless on-field violence has again reared its scaly head and howled at the supermoon with the voice of the damned and the charnel-house breath of someone who doesn’t floss very often.
Mere days have passed since Paul Gallen attempted to panel-beat the lumps out of Nate Myles’s face causing untold damage to the psyches of journalists everywhere and changing the face of rugby league forever.
Not Nate Myles’s face. The face that rugby league presents to the world. A face recently stripped of shoulder charges and now a face without punches raining down upon it like rain made of punches.
A face lifted by the removal of knuckles crashing into it. A face that people everywhere will now definitely want to stroke with their eyeballs firmly on the TV screens that show rugby league at its about-faced best.
It’s a face that is instantly more beautiful; more Brad Pitt than acne-pitted. In their wisdom the very best sports minds and league critics pointed out to the rest of us that without punches, people who usually don’t watch the sport will now no longer continue to not watch.
Rugby league saved itself from a Fight Club style self-beating when its ruling elite declared that after 100+ years of punching-on being an inherent risk of a ferocious collision sport, the rules against knuckling an opponent’s mush will now be enforced.
The sport has taken the drastic step of introducing what they’ve termed “referees” – non-playing participants in the game whose job it is to oversee and enforce the rules of the sport on the fly. They even get whistles and natty little flags.
It remains to be seen if this innovation will have any effect but if it’s half as efficacious as the removal of bony balls of fist from stony countenances has been in terms of improving rugby league, it may prove to be a masterstroke.
Dave Smith et al, take a bow.
The measures introduced to mollify the reasonable and measured concerns of rugby league’s reluctant critics have gone a long way to healing the incredible damage done by Paul Gallen’s fists to the national psyche.
No longer do we fear letting our guard down to snatch a few minutes desperately-needed sleep. We’ve stopped telling our children horrible, nightmarish bedtime stories about NSW captains hiding under their beds.
Crime has dropped 97% in the last week as the soothed populace returned home from the wildernesses they’d fled to in blind, animal panic at the thought of a couple of rugby league players duking it out on the TV.
We’d just learned to breathe normally again when out of nowhere more on-field violence has skewered us like the delicate butterflies we are to the cardboard of hate by some sort of evil of butterflies collector.
You don’t need it spelled out any clearer than that.
We have once again been collectively assaulted in our homes by the gruesome sight of on-field violence.
When AFL club Fremantle Dockers ‘tagger’ Ryan Crowley pinched his opponent – North Melbourne’s Brent Harvey – in an undisclosed location an undisclosed number of times, he may as well have been pinching our hard-won innocence.
With every nasty squeeze of Harvey’s tortured flesh between the hammer of Crowley’s forefinger and the anvil of his thumb, he was doing more than visiting barbaric violence like some hideous reptilian beast, for example dinosaurs.
He was ripping the stitches out of our collective wounds, pinching the barely-healed scars with his malicious, grasping claws.
It was a horse-bite of hate that once again had us gathering our loved ones to our bosoms and running for the hills in fear of the end of civilisation as the gaping wound left by this act of savagery left us all wailing and gnashing our teeth.
However, once again the responsible governing body of the sport in question has stepped into the breach to stem the psychic bleeding and coax us down out of the trees.
Crowley will be fined somewhere between $900 and $1200 for his ruthless act.
This will send a strong message to his fellow AFL players that like their rugby league playing cousins, this sort of thuggish rubbish will not be tolerated.
We can un-board the windows, unload the shotgun, restore the electricity and once again return to our TV screens in time for State of Origin 2, safe at last.
For now.
Reckon you can pick the winning team? Build your own dream team with Draftstars daily fantasy and compete on any match. For great odds on the NRL head on over to PlayUp. Imagine what you could be buying instead. Set a deposit limit.