Four over-reactions for one non-event tackle: NRL bunker and judiciary make bad call worse on Niukore ‘hip-drop’

The NRL must be overdue for a judiciary overhaul, it’s been a few weeks since the last one. 

Warriors forward Marata Niukore is the latest player to feel the wrath of the judiciary process for an “incident” that wasn’t even incidental in his team’s stirring win over Cronulla. 

Niukore made a tackle on Siosifa Talakai, dragging him down from behind as he hung onto his hips as the powerful Shark threatened to make a break after Warriors centre Adam Pompey had already been bumped off by the Tongan international. 

Referee Ben Cummins said it best when he said nothing at all. The play continued and that should have been that.

CLICK HERE for a seven-day free trial for your favourite sport on KAYO

But the bunker intervened at the end of Cronulla’s set, dragging the play back downfield and telling Cummins to penalise Niukore. There’s your first mistake, there, right there.

Marata Niukore scores a try as he is tackled by Will Kennedy. (Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)

Then he was told the second-rower should go on report, doubling down on the initial error. 

And then he was banished to the sin bin. A trifecta of blunders.

Warriors coach Andrew Webster was bemused post game but his team won so he didn’t blow up, not that he’s the kind to do so anyway.

But in true rugby league fashion, officials are like players and coaches – they are programmed to never back down because that could be seen as being weak or worse still, an admission that they made a mistake. 

And there it was, a quadruple bunger writ large on the official NRL charge sheet from Sunday’s matches – the match review committee not only pinged Niukore but claimed it was a grade-two offence. 

Niukore is now staring down the barrel of a two-match ban or three if he unsuccessfully takes on the judiciary.

“Talakai was pulling through the tackle. There was no other place for Niukore to be other than behind him,” NSW coach Brad Fittler said on Nine commentary. 

Niukore lunged at the player from behind, got him around the waist and then gravity was his co-pilot as his body fell to the Shark Park turf, without making any significant contact with Talakai’s legs. 

It wasn’t a dangerous tackle, it was actually a very good one, particularly with the Warriors down 26-12 in the 39th minute and facing the prospect of more Cronulla points being added if Talakai broke free.

As the NRL’s only team in New Zealand, the Warriors are a crucial plank in the competition’s broadcast rights value – Sky NZ wouldn’t be paying north of $30 million a year if there was no local side in the premiership.  

But they don’t get much help on this side of the Tasman Sea. They’re supposed to be a “stakeholder” in the game, one of 17 franchises on an equal footing but they’re the NRL’s distant cousins.

That was shown during the pandemic when they struggled to get any information out of head office for weeks after they had made a momentous sacrifice by relocating from their homeland indefinitely for what turned out to be the best part of three years based in Australian outposts. 

They received plenty of lip service throughout their time in Tamworth, Gosford and the Sunshine Coast thanking them for helping the competition to keep going but when the NRL had the golden chance to give the Warriors extra home games this year or incentivise Australian clubs to play matches in New Zealand, they were again snubbed.

Only the NRL’s nomadic Wests Tigers have transplanted a match to NZ this season. 

Marata Niukore and Shaun Johnson celebrate. (Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)

They’re getting shafted again with this decision on Niukore, a needless body blow for a team which has defied the odds and dire pre-season predictions to be sitting pretty in second place with a 4-1 record.

None of this is to say that hip-drop tackles aren’t a problem. They are a disgusting tactic and anyone who deliberately tries to swing their body onto the legs of an unsuspecting tackler should be banned for months, not weeks. 

Broncos forward Patrick Carrigan was lucky to only get four games at the end of last season for his terrible tackle on Jackson Hastings which left him with a broken leg.

Niukore was one of three players charged from Sunday’s matches for a hip-drop – Dale Finucane’s tackle on Charnze-Nicoll-Klokstad deserved a grade-one charge but he’s been given double that and because it’s his third offence, he is looking at 3-4 matches out. 

Bulldogs winger Jayden Okunbor’s nasty tackle on Cowboys co-captain Jason Taumalolo was easily the worst of the three but because he has an unblemished record, his only punishment will be sitting out this Friday’s stoush with Souths. 

NRL head of football Graham Annesley, in his weekly Monday afternoon media briefing, highlighted the sliding scale of outcomes for Finucane to Niukore to Okunbor based on their respective record but that’s not the issue this time around – the problem is that one shouldn’t have been charged at all, one was graded too harshly and the worst one of the lot is going to cop the feather touch.

He denied there was a crackdown underway on hip-drop tackles but reiterated the NRL had been trying to eradicate the tactic for several seasons. 

Braden Hamlin-Uele is rounded up by Marata Niukore. (Photo by Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)

Annesley, at pains as always to say he wasn’t referring to the active cases, said the vast majority of judiciary cases were not deliberate acts but accidents or the result of poor techniques.  

He clarified that the NRL made a change this year so a referee now only stops play and goes back to the spot on the field where an infringement has occurred if the incident was serious enough to warrant a sin-binning or send-off.

“No one is saying that anyone goes out there to deliberately hurt anyone or to deliberately commit an offence. We all know that the game happens at a hundred miles an hour, players are just trying to get the ball carrier onto the ground and sometimes things go wrong.

“But unfortunately an offence either takes place or it doesn’t.”

Never a truer word was spoken – Niukore committed no offence and should not have been applauded for a cover tackle not penalised, reported, sin-binned and charged. 

The Warriors have until midday on Tuesday to decide whether they will contest the charge but that carries the risk of the player spending an extra week on the sidelines, so the system is set up to discourage anyone exposing its inherent flaws which are exposed in a case like this.