Opinions are not universally like a**holes; for NRL players, they’re near a**holes.
When a player tackles the back of an opponent’s legs to bring him to the ground, the first sight he may see when he looks up again could be the sponsor’s message on the left-hand side of the back of the shorts.
Closer to the hamstring than the a**hole, such shorts normally contain no additional messages beside brand names.
Tackles, in general, are fascinating in rugby league. How often they are depicted as solitary actions in the statistics and how seldom it is that they occur like that in play?
The average tackle, as far as I can tell, concerns three defenders. Slow the attacking player’s momentum, stop him, and bring him to the ground. When it is a more assertive tackle, especially when the defence is trying to drag their opponent out of bounds, the aggressor will seek the ground like he is trying to crack a safe code by ear.
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Opportunities to think about what one is seeing are improved by the NRL’s showing of matches for free online once they are over – even those originally shown on pay television.
Credit where it’s due, for it to be of any use, sport should stimulate the mind, which is easier when you can pause, rewind and fast forward.
It also shows recognition that sport is more than about the score; it’s also about the story. At a time when cricket has become the most recent sport in Australia to put more of its live content behind a paywall, it is worthy of some gratitude.
A prominent part of the story, at least this year, has been the refereeing. Justice on a sporting field is always difficult to compare to justice outside of it, and the NRL helps show why. The participants, for example, are all adults, so age cannot be provided as a mitigating factor when someone breaks the rules.
While it is true that the level of choice in a non-offending team’s choice of punishing the opposition more closely resembles what a judge in a courtroom might have in terms of sentencing options, the choice is the player’s. The laws on a whole are easy to access – if only because it would be a big story if they were not.
Not all analogies, however, are so limited in their application.
The Melbourne Storm, for instance, trigger a unique feeling of schadenfreude whenever they give away a penalty, and on the weekend they conceded not one, not two, but three penalty goals in the first half – like a particular group of people who, for whatever reason, attract less sympathy.
Mind you, even I had to sympathise when a try was disallowed on the weekend because of the opposition’s malfeasance at the play-the-ball. Billy Slater’s pass was a corker.
But then that’s just my opinion.
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