That’s it. Do they count Scott Prince’s house? Greg Inglis’ boat? Cameron Smith’s home reno? The Roosters brothel visits? Todd Carney’s ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ cards?

I don’t know why they couldn’t just hand out appropriate punishments for shoulder charges gone wrong. Even with the new rule “banning” the shoulder charge, we have no idea how it’s going to be policed or sentenced. For all we know, it’ll be the same farce where every player comes in with a highly paid legal team, argues around rules that were never drafted to withstand legal challenge and gets no punishment at all.

If they’re up for a shoulder charge, they’ll argue they just hit him with a high elbow and because that doesn’t fit within the original charge, they get no punishment, rather than being charged with a high shot instead.

There’s no point in changing rules if the system intended to punish rulebreakers is so thoroughly broken.

Screw the top guys. Let’s make sure the blokes who do the same work with less finesse are looked after. Whenever anyone attempts to justify a salary in the hundreds of thousands they alway come back with “You can’t play league forever, this way they’re looked after for the future.” So what about the blokes taking the same physical toll on their bodies for $60k a year? Who is looking after them?

It’s hard. It takes a lot to open up about something so completely humbling. It’s hard enough to share the feelings of self doubt and shame with people you know and love, let alone having it publicly known so muppets like Billy Slater can tell you to “go cry in your room” and worse.

The reasons I can think for the decline of both sports:

– Parents tend to push their kids toward team sports for the social element.
– Both sports have a significantly outlay before you start
– Both sports have fees just to use the playing surface
– Both sports require a degree of skill just to play – you can put a 6 year old on a footy field and it doesn’t really matter if they can kick a ball or make a tackle – it takes a lot more to be able to return a serve or hit a golf ball clean, and you don’t really have teammates to cover your deficiencies while you develop.
– For tennis, the elite male players seem strangely effeminate; the elite females ultra masculine. Nothing wrong with that, but it does fly in the face of how kids are conditioned to look.

So in a society where the cost of living is rising and everyone wants instant gratification without having to work for it, it makes sense.

Brett Kimmorley will do as an early Christmas present for the Raiders. From his commentary, he’s obviously very switched on and should work wonders for our young halves. Bring on 2013!

Sooo…. It’s okay for Brett Finch to turn down big money, but not Israel Folau? The ARLC either needs to standardise the way it assesses player value, or they need to stop arbitrarily blocking some contracts and not others.

It’s almost unfathomable that they’d bicker endlessly with the reigning wooden spooners over their intention to bring a human headline back to the sport, and yet ignore the fact that the reigning premiers are gradually reassembling the squad that were told they couldn’t take pay cuts to remain together after the 2009 cap scandal. It’s only taken a couple of years for the dust to settle and it’s pretty clear the Storm haven’t suffered from their “punishment” at all, beyond having a season without points on the table. You could even argue that they’re better off now having shed dead wood like Adam Blair, Jeff Lima and Ryan Tandy. Compare them to Carlton, who spent half a decade at the bottom of the hole they were dumped in for their transgressions.

This is pretty pissweak. I haven’t seen any of these blokes acknowledge the fact that some of them get paid ten times more than some of their team mates for essentially doing the same job. I’d be chuffed to see the minimum wage increased, and the second tier cap increased, but I don’t feel like that’s what’s at stake here. Does it really matter if Johnathan Thurston earns $800k a year or $1m? It doesn’t make the game better, it doesn’t help to grow the game – it just makes him a richer man.

It’s not like that money just comes out of nowhere. You give each team an extra $1.5m a year and that’s $24 million that has to come from somewhere else – promoting the game, building grass roots footy, helping out indigenous communities, putting some savings away so the next TV deal doesn’t have to be purely about the highest bid, etc. This is pretty disgraceful from the players/agents who are spearheading this.

When I saw the headline, I thought this was going to be an article about Jamal Idris. Carry on.

Maybe Cameron Smith can go all Thich Quang Duc and set himself on fire in protest. It wouldn’t take much – I’m pretty sure his shoulder hair already comes with warnings to keep it away from naked flames.

Is this the same club that is re-signing Brett Finch for a fraction of what he was earning overseas?

And that’s just in four origin appearances.

This seems like a bit of a kneejerk reaction to a pissweak judiciary system. Why couldn’t we just punish shoulder charges that go wrong, rather than banning them altogether? Handing out a token week suspension here and there was never going to deter anyone. If Greg Inglis had gotten 8-12 weeks for turning Dean Young into a pink mist, You can bet players would make more of an effort to bend their knees and their back.

Canberra’s best bet might be pushing Josh McCrone up into dummy half. He’s got good quick service, lots of acceleration and a solid kicking game. It would waste some of his talents in finding gaps out wide, but it would be a shame to see any of the halves go back to Mounties.

I though the safe money was on keeping Iro for another season and then going out hard after Bellamy in 2014. They may still do that, I’m predicting Matt Elliot will be in for a tough year. If I believe everything that I read, the players are already offside on this decision.

I’m not sure I’d say they gutted their team. They kept their spine intact and have since welcomed back a few of the players who were forced out. Their only significant loss was Greg Inglis, but that’s only on the assumption that his lackadaisical 2009-2010 form would have turned around without a change of club, coach and position. Of the rest, Turner, Tolman, White and Johnson are honest toilers, Finch was a ring-in, Blair, Lima and Tandy are grubs and idiots.

Really, they were just forced by the NRL to do what they should have been doing all along – trimming the fat, and replacing them with young up and comers like O’Neill, Bromwich, Widdop, etc and cheap, reliable journeymen like Norrie, Lowrie and Lowe. Take a look at any other team from 2009 and compare them to their 2012 lineup. For an extreme example, look at the Eels for a team that was gutted.

There’s no real punishment for what the Storm did. On the surface, the fines seemed harsh, but they were already paying that sort of money in overpayments each year. The players still feel like their illegitimate premierships are for real, the players that left seemed to all score inflated contracts well beyond their worth, and so from my perspective, what should have been a massive punishment for prolonged and systematic cheating of the entire game has just been a minor inconvenience. A speedbump of half a season or so. The only lesson the Storm might have learned is “Don’t pay overs for muppets like Adam Blair”.

Imagine if Hansie Cronje had simply been fined a fraction of the money he’d pocketed from crooked bookmakers and allowed to play on after sitting out a single summer, or if the Waterhouses were back on the track in ’85 after a token slap on the wrist. Or if Lance Armstrong had one of his titles taken away but got to keep the other six. Or if Carlton hand’t been stripped of draft picks in 2002-2003.

I shouldn’t be surprised given that soft punishments run across the board in the NRL, whether it’s a token one year ban for a guy repeatedly beating his pregnant partner, a token week or two for a brutal shoulder charge against a helpless opponent – it’s just a bit disheartening.

If you’re going to introduce a harsh “zero tolerance” type system into salary cap punishments, this is the wrong place to do it. Mistakes will happen (though $187,140 seems like a pretty big mistake) and I highly doubt that withdrawing the right to compete will address that issue.

If the ARLC wants to get to the heart of the matter, they need to punish the players. They need to be able to say “I don’t care if you’re the future captain of Australia and Queensland, or that you’re destined to be considered one of the all time greats – you cheated. You were complicit in a degree of cheating far more significant than the fixing of a single match and so you’re out.”

If the player legitimately knew nothing about what was going on, then they can take their club and their manager to the cleaners and have their lifetime ban reviewed and potentially overturned. But you can bet clubs and players would sit up and take notice if all of a sudden the Australian spine was no longer eligible to play.

It’s about time the judiciary handed down a tough sentence, but at the end of the day, while biting is a dog act, it’s never going to be as harmful as say, Anthony Minichiello trying to knock Josh Dugan’s block off with a pair of deliberate high shots, or Greg Inglis smashing a stationary player as hard as he can with a shoulder to the jaw, or even Issac Luke diving at someone’s knees. So what’s the judiciary for? I feel like a hair pull would get more than a swinging arm, just because of the extra loading for “fighting like a girl”.

Surely it would be more appropriate for the judiciary to act as a deterent for the sort of actions that could end the victim’s career, rather than the actions that destroy any respect the offender may have earned.

Under the old system, and using a bit of “artistic” license to determine the winners:

Week 1:

Canterbury defeat Brisbane
Melbourne defeat Sharks
Souths defeat Canberra
Manly defeat North Queensland

Week 2:
Manly defeat Canberra
Souths defeat North Queensland

Week 3:
Canterbury defeat Manly
Melbourne defeat Souths

Grand Final:
Canterbury vs Melbourne

It’s really not hugely different, except that there’s a possibility of a Canterbury/Souths grand final and a possibility of a Manly/Melbourne grand final, rather than those being the preliminaries. In fact, we even get a lot of the same games, just in reverse order (ie Souths vs Canberra and Manly vs North Queensland in week 1, then Canterbury vs Manly and Melbourne vs Souths in week 3)

I don’t mind the new system, but it’s hard to argue that it’s “better”, just different. As a Raiders fan, it might have been better to have the old system. We could have gotten the loss to Souths out of the way in Week 1, and then upset Manly, Canterbury and Melbourne (like we did in the regular season) for a fourth grand final win.

If a poor decision doesn’t end up figuring in things, I’m less likely to be hugely critical of it. There were some absolute clangers in the Raiders game, like Sandor Earl being pinged for not being square at marker, and the decision to award Inglis a penalty try – when you could make a pretty good argument that if Blake Ferguson was able to tackle him before he got the ball, then he’d still be in a position to tackle him *after* he got the ball, and 10 metres out, that might have been enough to stop him. Personally, I think it should have been 10 minutes in the bin for Ferguson, rather than a penalty try – though that might be a tad harsh.

But as a Raiders fan, I can say we made too many mistakes and killed our own momentum any time we started to mount a comeback. The Bunnies were the better team, so the contentious decisions didn’t make me fume in the same way, even though it was my team being put to the sword.

If it happens to any other team, I’ll be just as indignant, though in the Storm’s case I might chalk it up to karma.

From mine, the Cowboys weren’t denied a victory, but they were denied the opportunity to compete for one. The last 15-20 minutes were characterised by desperate plays not coming off for the Cowboys – even if they were only 6 points down, they’d have played very different football and might have gotten themselves back into it. Such a shame, I’d much rather have the excitement of the Cowboys playing entertaining footy on that side of the draw than more from Manly/Melbourne, given how dreary the 2008 grand final was.

I don’t have a problem with punches being thrown in senior Rugby League, as long as it’s consensual. Nothing wrong with a couple of blokes punching on, unless someone is being blindsided, king hit and the like. It’s worth a penalty against the instigator.

In junior league, I support tough rulings against all foul play and suspensions for that sort of thing. There’s a massive difference between professional sportsmen taking part in a dangerous contact sport – fully aware of the risks – and kids playing social sport who are still developing mentally, physically and socially. Those kids deserve better protections against harm, and part of that is significant deterents against foul play. Besides which, mismatched opponents at NRL level comes down to say Shane Webcke picking Dave Furner, or Steve Price picking Brett White. At schoolboy level, you might have a 60kg halfback up against a 100kg front rower.

The problem for me is that the video refs don’t seem to look at cause and effect. Was there a shot that definitively showed Foran tapping the ball forward? No. Were there multiple shots showing the ball change momentum sharply in the same direction as Foran’s arm movement? Yes.

Any sane person looks at that and says “there’s 99.9% chance that Foran knocked on. No try.” The video ref whether by mistake or by design looks at it and says “I can’t conclusively say he touched it. Try.” The video ref would look at a player who has collapsed from a gunshot wound, and a second shot showing a smoking gun metres away and say there’s no conclusive evidence to link the two. It’s an issue with both the video ref and the judiciary that gives us insane try rulings and instances where players aren’t punished for foul play because they can’t rule out the possibility that maybe a player’s jaw spontaneously exploded into several pieces from a shoulder charge in the chest.

The fix is simple. Benefit of the doubt goes to the defending team, and the onus is shifted onto players fronting the judiciary to conclusively disprove the charges. It won’t be perfect, and occasionally a player will be hard done by. But surely that’s preferable to the laughing stock that we have now.

I’m a staunch advocate of this sort of thing. We could pit Cameron Smith against Glenn Stewart in a bit of good old fashioned Greco Roman, see if George Rose can outlast Jamal Idris in a beep test, have Chris Sandow line up against Josh Miller as both try to make it through the “Wall Bangers” game from Takeshi’s Castle – the possibilities are limitless. It could be a decathlon with each team nominating 5 events each. The only flaw I can see is that it might upstage the main game.

Does the “Centre for Excellence” count in worst buys? For whatever reason, “mate’s rates” from Michael Searle to his fellow Titans means “3 times what it’s actually worth”.