Cleary sin bin highlights flawed rule that needs to be changed immediately

The Nathan Cleary kerfuffle? In sin-binning him, referee Gerard Sutton applied the rule correctly.

The rule has a good overall purpose – to save kickers from being ironed out late. But the rule is also one of those flawed pieces of writing that turns a harmless accident into a binary outcome with outsized consequences.

Kickers need to be protected from a defender trying recklessly to flatten them, not one who, attempting a charge down, runs past and clips (or is clipped by, it doesn’t matter) the kicker’s leg.

The rule, by reducing the violation to the fact of the contact rather than the defensive player’s intent, is one of those easy ways out favoured by lawmakers, who like things in black and white.

For Cleary to have been suspended would be to compound the error. He was handed a grade-one dangerous contact charge on Monday morning and is free to play in the preliminary final.

It is similar to when rugby union turned an attempted intercept into a red-card offence: a simple-minded rule of staggering stupidity that routinely wrecks games.

Rugby league, characterised by its pragmatism, has largely managed to avoid the self-defeating legalistic quicksand into which union has sunk. League boss Peter V’landys usually asks, “What would rugby union do?” and does the opposite.

For the sake of Sunday’s game, Cleary’s 10 minutes in the bin were the critical period when Penrith proved themselves the better team. But this rule could do with some instant redrafting: give the referee some discretion over whether the contact merits a sin-binning, and if it is incidental contact, award the penalty where the act takes place, not downfield where the kick lands.

And don’t even talk about harsher sanctions, unless you want to follow rugby union down the forensic gurgler.

Attack of killer Dolphins

In recent months the top four teams have been playing in a different division from the rest, and this was underscored with the qualifying finals markedly superior in quality to the eliminators.

All four weekend finals matches were tight, entertaining, sweaty-palms affairs, characterised by tough defence and conservative attacking game plans. Notably, there was an average of seven set restarts per clash and only three in the Panthers-Roosters epic. Refereed more like Origin, the games were better for it.

A week ago, Harry Grant had his integrity questioned for criticising the high number of six agains. The refereeing of the finals was the best way for the NRL to concede, just quietly, that Grant was right.

So we can’t have a Penrith-Warriors grand final any more. But the Dolphins’ win in Auckland, which upset that applecart, raises the tantalising prospect of the NRL’s most exhilarating attacking line-up making the big day.

Of the eight teams that played on the weekend, the Dolphins were alone, when under pressure, in damning the torpedoes, unleashing their instincts and uninhibitedly setting themselves to score their way out of trouble.

By next week they could be premiership favourites, and not just with the neutrals.

The name of the game

Now is not the time to join the pile-on of basement video official Chris Butler, whose decisions on Friday left Wayne Bennett calling for the entire bunker to be blown up.

It would be unfair to ask why Butler, who no longer referees at this level, is given power to overrule on-field refs’ decisions, or why he has been kicked upstairs (or downstairs). Nor is now the time to note that Butler’s dilatory ruminations stretched both of his games (Knights-Rabbitohs and Dolphins-Warriors) beyond the 100-minute mark.

No, give the guy a break. Human error, like nuclear waste, can never be safely buried underground.

But, but … what about the pronunciation of names? When did Adam Pompey become “Adam Pompeii”, the city buried under lava from Mount Vesuvius? And is a “Jack Bow-stock” an item of Nordic mountaineering equipment?

By Sunday, Butler’s bunker colleague Wyatt Raymond didn’t even dare have a crack at pronouncing Nawaqanitawase, calling the Roosters winger, simply, “Mark”.

Yes, the bunker has bigger issues on its plate than how it says players’ names. We are all just waiting for a bunker error to decide a grand final – or, in bunker speak, a gronday finalee.

Forward-thinking

Call it forward-pass bingo. Every NRL game, there are about 40 forward passes, and the officials randomly pick out one or two to pull up.

There have been suggestions that microchips might be implanted into the ball. This sounds about as good a use of technology as the bunker. No, rugby league, don’t do it! A better solution is for players to stop passing the ball forward. The best way to get there is for refs to blow the whistle on the first
forward passes they see, not just those they pull out of a hat later in the game.

Crowdsourcing

And the crowds? Over to you, Nicho Hynes: “It’s a little bit upsetting. It’s a bit disappointing and embarrassing that there’s so many free seats here. I’ve seen up there it was 17,000. I’m not blaming the Sharks fans at all. They turned up and were really loud. We would’ve got 15,000 at Shark Park and there’s only 2000 more people here.”

Equally embarrassing were the 8000 empty seats at Parramatta and 14,000 empty seats at Moore Park. The weather was ideal.

The clubs do a good job selling tickets throughout the season; maybe the NRL should let them keep doing it for week one of the finals.