I hear those eastern suburbs types aren’t really into bread – they’ve all gone low carb 😛

As a neutral and someone who watches more Union, I really don’t think any but the most stridently one eyed fans will feel this way in a few weeks time – let alone 10 years.

As I’ve posted elsewhere, watching this from a Rugby perspective I found it almost amusing that League fans consider these to be refereeing “howlers”. All I can say is be thankful you’re not watching the endless refereeing debacle that is the Rugby World Cup right now.

But, bringing that rugby perspective into this, what struck me as interesting is that in Union the “trainer” incident would have been a penalty to the Roosters and a yellow card to Soliola for recklessly endangering a player in the air by running in shoulders first and also hitting late (I believe this is also a straight penalty in League too most of the time).

But funnily enough the Cronk incident would likely have just been a penalty as that wouldn’t meet the Union criteria for a send off (although just about everything else does now). I was extremely impressed by the Roosters resilience to weather that period.

On the 5th tackle correction, I thought that was odd, but I’d actually expected Canberra to double down and pin the Roosters in their 30 metre zone in response. After all the Roosters were camped on their 10 metre line!

The fact that the Roosters managed to some how pull off a brilliant play and cover 90 metres in the process was to me a sign of the difference between the two sides. The Roosters weathered a very tough call for a full ten minutes, whilst the Raiders folded 30 seconds after they got denied a half chance.

“I argued this in the Melbourne Canberra summary a few weeks back. If we all made such a monumental error in our jobs (costing an organisation $600,000 ($1 million less the prize for second place I believe)), plus the individual player payments, would be be told to simply move on? I’ve seen people fired or at the very least reprimanded for much less.”

It depends on the industry really. In banking I’ve seen more than my share of blokes cost shareholders tens or even hundreds of millions and yet get given juicy bonuses.

Ultimately the refs are a variable in the match that teams need to work to account for. The difference in this match to my mind was that the Roosters accounted for the things that went against them – including the biggest disadvantage of the game in losing their 7 and going a man down for 10 – whilst the Raiders didn’t account for one lost half chance at a kick on the fifth tackle.

I think you’ve just proved Tim’s point Forty Twenty… There’s a lot of hypotheticals in that statement and you conveniently ignore that the scores were still locked up. What’s more, the Roosters were camped on their 10 metre line at the end of it all. It wasn’t the refs that saw them march 90 metres up the field in a couple tackles – it was the Raiders defenders and a freak flick pass from Mitchell.
The Raiders had the opportunity to do something similar through Leilua whilst the Roosters were still a man down, but he bungled the ball forward.
If you’re looking for a match defining incident, I’d focus on those.

I didn’t need to read past your title. I can safely say it’s going to be a nightmare. This Wallabies team are not well drilled enough, not skillful enough and not lack the technique in almost all aspects of the game required to do well – let alone win – in a big tournament like the RWC.

Add to that that Cheika’s tactics for the tournament have been dreadful so far, seemingly not having paid any thought to how inconsistent selections would effect the team’s progress, and you have a recipe for disaster.

lol this is the sort of response I’m talking about. The controversial calls we’re talking about here were not the sort that kills a contest or decides a result.

All I can say is all the League fans here should be thankful they’re not watching the lunacy on display in the Rugby World Cup where every second game is destroyed by a player being sent off for the whole game or dubious passes or penalties being pulled back seemingly at random by the TMO five minutes after the fact when no one has asked their opinion.

The NRL’s system of adjudication was ironically a breath of fresh air to me after all the Union I’ve been watching.

As a neutral observer that watches more Union, I am pretty bemused that this is what qualifies as match deciding controversies in League.

To me neither event really rose to the level of controversial. The trainer incident was odd, but if it was a RWC the ruling would have been a yellow card to Soliola for tackling the kicker in the air and running in with his shoulders.

The sin bin would have been a penalty tops though ironically as the priorities on what qualifies as a send off are all geared around contact and not early tackles.

As for the 6 again, I don’t get what the fuss is as the Roosters were still camped on their 10 with it all to do after the Raiders had fired what seemed like endless shots at the Roosters line to no avail.

I was frankly surprised the Raiders didn’t rally and pin them in their 20 for the full set after all the defending the Roosters had been forces to do, but they seem to have responded to the call with less resilience than the Roosters did to their sin bin.

And yet his ego is still nothing on Folau’s, which is so staggeringly bloated that it could fill Optus Stadium.

Your question presumes there’s only one way for “a person as religious as Folau” to answer that question. It’s not. Is Folau a religious scholar with a deep understanding of the religious texts, their history and the context they were written? No, he’s some blow-hard footy player with a shallow understanding of the faith desperately trying to virtue signal to his ultra conservative community that he’s a reliable tribal warrior for this petty issue THEY have.

Go read the analysis of actual Christian scholars like Bart Ehrman, and tell me Folau has better Christian credentials than him, and then explain to me why Ehrman can see no issue with homosexuality of any consequence in the gospels whilst Folau can only think of one way to respond.

Perhaps it’s only the shallow believers, rather than the truly dedicated students of the faith, that think like Folau.

Folau’s religious condemnation of homosexuality is the core topic being discussed here champ. Try to keep up will you.

That all you’ve got Jacko? You don’t have an answer the point at hand so you just hurl insults? Wow… and you call me arrogant.

There is little more arrogant in this world than religious faith, which presumes to tell societies how to live based on fantasies, exaggerations and lies, so forgive me for not showing much patience.

You misunderstand the point. What I’m attacking is the notion that simply “standing up for your religious beliefs” is something worthy of admiration. It’s not; faith is at the root of some seriously noxious and vile “moral standards” and so if your yardstick for admiring someone is that they’re standing firm on their noxious beliefs because it’s “their faith”, then your aligning yourself with some pretty nasty stuff.

Birdy, you sound like the Christian equivalent to some sort of communist; a man at war with market forces in the name of an irrational ideology. I’ll leave you to wilt in the heat dear snowflake.

What are you on about? Talk about a bunch of non-sequiturs…

Doing business with Islamic countries is now accepting Sharia in Australia is it? As a capitalist I call BS on that and our meat industry makes a lot of money on the arrangement. In fact the business we do supports Australian industry and jobs MORE than our purchasing of their oil, but apparently you’re too scared to consider taking action on that. I wonder why? Too hard maybe?

As for atheists at Dunkirk, how would you [Mods. Snip. language pls] know? Is all you have here a bunch of bald statements with no facts to back them up? Is that why religion worked so well on you?

Yikes.. The lack of reason and logic in that analogy was almost impressive.

I’ll reinterpret it for you to help you understand what’s actually going on:

Little Johnny is seen by all his class mates smashing the school window. His class is full of people who both agree and disagree with him smashing the window, but the teacher and the school broadly agree with the practice and insist every class have one child responsible for smashing the window. The school also funds a bus service between several other schools. This service is independently managed and isn’t subject to the schools broader policy of breaking windows and ensures the practice isn’t observed on its buses. The bus service enters into agreements with other schools whose buses don’t travel to all the destinations their students want to go. The schools who allow their students to use this bus service are now responsible for all the windows little Johnny broke and therefore should no longer be allowed to discipline children in their schools that break windows. Case closed.

You don’t even need to go that far. Remember that Scott McIntyre soccer bloke who worked for SBS and lost his job because he called the ANZACs a bunch of rapists and war criminals? I sure as heck don’t remember people being so concerned about free speech with him, and frankly I thought SBS had every right to fire him for his stupid remarks.

Yeah you’re allowed your opinion, but if your opinion is basically pure prejudice – like Folau’s – and you bleat it self righteously and arrogantly to the point where he’s spitting in the face of your employer, then frankly they’re within their rights to show you the door.

No, but Izzy would probably go out of his way to post how he hoped the gay repented before he died, because if he didn’t his sky daddy would be roasting him now.

“The reason there is no media uproar over David Pocock is because either people are agreeing with him or too scared to say anything for fear of what we are seeing now.”

No, the reason is that Pocock’s stances have been about increasing inclusiveness, whilst Folau’s stances have all been about condemning “sinners” and explaining that the gays in particular better fall in line if they don’t want to burn for all eternity.

I personally think anyone who thinks that must have been dropped on the head too many times as a kid, but for plenty of PI kids who have been brought up in obsessively Christian environments that’s not an option and they may not yet be armed with enough facts about the real world to laugh it off.

Seems to me that he’s been focusing in on the gays independently since then. It’s almost like he has some deep rooted personal issue…

If it was a Koran bashing guy wanting to confine women to the home and unable to walk anywhere unaccompanied by men, some how I don’t reckon you’d think it was that strange.

Yet strangely seems to focus all his attention on gays… funny that.

Sounds to me like you’re putting words in Mary’s mouth and that you failed to read her full article. But hey, if you can’t argue the point it’s just make ad-hominem attacks on who is making it. Well done.

I’ll try help you out though, the key point you seem to be having trouble with is the part where Lodge has shown remorse and worked his way back into the game. Folau was never frozen out of the game, but isn’t showing any sign that he understands the views of those who disagree with his hateful beliefs.

As I wrote above, I’d be interested to know how you’d feel about an Islamic Fundamentalist player that doesn’t personally advocate violence, but publicly spent all his time on social media warning that all those innocents who die in religious violence basically had it coming and deserve no sympathy because they were infidels.

Wait, so you demand everyone respect Izzy’s right to free speech, but not Muslims wanting prayers said whilst their meat is slaughtered?

Having worked in the meat industry, nothing amuses me more than people going nuts about Halal. It’s just the cost of doing business in Muslim countries, and is frankly akin to trying to sell food products to a vegan; if you want their market share, then you’ve got to meet the standards demanded by consumers in that bracket. It’s that simple, and given Muslim countries are a massive customer of our meat products you’ll that capitalism doesn’t much care about this cost if it means big bucks for the member of the MLA. Sorry, but those are the facts.

At the end of the day, if all these self-righteous anti-Halal campaigners were even remotely interested in cutting funding to religious groups in Islamic countries, then they’d get far more bang for their buck by boycotting all energy sources, products and services related to the production of oil in the Middle East, as that funds 90% of all their activities.

But they won’t because that would require a lifestyle change on their part and it’s a lot easier to just bleat “HALAL” into a social media forum as though it means something.

How are those two things the same?

Lodge has made a terrible mistake, copped a huge penalty and spent all his time trying to work his way back into the game whilst demonstrating genuine remorse for the harm he’s caused.

Folau hasn’t physically hurt anyone, but he’s pig-headedly been consistently trying to shove his baseless and hypocritical beliefs on everyone by using his considerable social media fame to push religious condemnation of people born with different innate desires in the realm of relationships between consenting adults.

It’s a little like comparing Lodge to an Islamic Fundamentalist that doesn’t personally advocate violence, but publicly warns all those innocents who die in religious violence basically had it coming and deserve no sympathy because they were infidels. Sure, what Lodge did on his combined meds and booze was monstrous, but I know which would get more people angry in most western countries.

Would you admire him for “having the guts to stand up for what he believes in” if he was an Islamic fundamentalist that thinks women should be seen and not heard, and preferably covered head to toe? Would you admire him if he thought people who died in terrorist attacks got what they deserved because a holy book has passages suggesting the lives of unbelievers aren’t important?

This is the thing about admiring people for holding strong to their “beliefs” when those beliefs are based in a series of a very very old tribal texts based on baseless notions of what the world, how it came about and who should be running it based on which god they believe in. In short, you risk being an “admirer” of some pretty noxious stuff.