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When the ‘one punch and you’re off’ rule was brought in last season, like many rugby league fans I was outraged.
Fights had occurred in rugby league my entire life and I was worried that removing them would change the fabric of the game.
Slowly I was coming around and realising that maybe the game was fine without the violence. Just like the banning of the shoulder charge, I could see the method behind the madness.
Sure I was missing the traditional fisticuffs come Origin time, but I thought I could live without it.
But two games over this year’s finals series has led me to the conclusion that referees need some discretion when it comes to sin binning players for punching.
The first game is the Manly versus Canterbury game from the weekend, which resulted in two players being sin binned for punching. Josh Starling and Reni Maitua were only the third and fourth players binned this year for the new rule. It took 26 rounds before we saw our first two sin-binnings – of Tyrone Roberts and Josh Dugan – but that was in a dead rubber game where neither team could make the finals.
Starling and Maitua’s efforts seemed particularly stupid considering the game was sudden death. Lucky for the two of them neither incident affected the end result.
The question I pose is: should either player from last weekend’s match have been sent from the field?
My answer is no. If you look at the Starling incident in super slow-mo then yes, he cocks his fist and it makes connection with Josh Jackson’s face. Technically it is a punch.
In normal speed it’s a totally different story. Starling’s hand is moving so slow, he would struggle to knock the skin off a rice pudding. In reality it was more of a push.
But it’s one punch and you’re off. It is a black-and-white rule with no discretion.
The referee should be able to make the decision that the player can remain on the field, especially when the indiscretion that caused the incident was much worse than the punch itself (I’m not even going to start on how Jackson avoided a charge for his chicken wing tackle).
Again with Maitua’s punch, he was also quite unlucky to find himself in the bin. Of course after Starling had already been sent the referees had to do the same for Maitua or face claims of favouring one side. I have looked at Reni’s alleged punch several times and I still can’t be certain that his fist was closed. It looked more like a slap to me.
Neither incident cost their team points. The time Starling spent off the field remained scoreless, while it was 1-1 while Reni cooled his heels. Both incidents seemed to rally their teams and momentum swung to the team with fewer players on both occasions.
So while this week we saw players binned for barely throwing a punch, only a week earlier we saw the advantage nigglers now have in the game knowing they cannot be hit.
While I didn’t consider Michael Ennis’ head pat on Cam Smith to be that bad, players like Ennis now have the advantage of being able to get under the oppositions skin without the fear of copping one on the chin. If a bit of biff is gone from the game forever, it is necessary to penalise players for baiting their opposition as well.
But punching and fighting shouldn’t be an automatic sin-binning. I am by no means condoning the violence on the field and I understand it isn’t the best look for the game, but the referee should have the ability to make a decision on whether or not the act deserves ten minutes on the sideline.
The NRL has to stop acting like Helen Lovejoy and screaming, “Can somebody think of the children!” Instead make a punching rule that both punishes violence but keeps the game’s outcome fair.
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