Dear Peter V’landys, please don’t change the rules – again

Oh, to be a fly on the wall when ARL Commission chairman Peter V’landys sits down with his fellow board members to discuss the return of – pause for dramatic effect – The Wrestle.

I suspect the meeting will go something like this …

V’landys: “The Wrestle is back. How did this happen? I want answers, dammit!”

Wayne Pearce: “Let’s have a summit. Or set up a working group. Sub-committee, anyone?”

Professor Megan Davis: “I’ll commission a report”.

Dr Gary Weiss: “How much is this going to cost?”

Former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie: “The Wrestler. Loved that movie.”

Former Queensland tourism minister Kate Jones: “When’s the opening? We can make it a red-carpet event.”

Tony McGrath, the ARL’s longest-serving commissioner: “I’ve seen this movie before.”

Alan Sullivan QC: “Let’s sue every coach and player for damage to the game’s reputation. My fee starts at $2000 an hour.”

V’landys: “Hopeless! The lot of you. I’m calling Wayne Bennett to see what he thinks.”

When I spoke to V’landys just over a week ago, he was revelling in the quality of football with which we had been blessed.

“The footy’s been great,” he said. “We’ve got the right balance now. The penalties in your own 40m have made the pace the right pace.”

Nine days is a long time in rugby league, though, and on Sunday he told both the Herald and News Corp he was putting coaches and players “on notice” because The Wrestle was back.

The remarks came on the same day Danny Weidler wrote a column in The Sun-Herald quoting stats and unnamed coaches fearing The Wrestle was back like a bad rash.

Indeed, it’s hard to keep up.

Head of football Graham Annesley argued to Weidler that “the average time the ball is in play is marginally up on last year”. Now, the chairman is putting the entire competition on notice and will discuss the matter with the commission on Tuesday.

Forget stats. You can bend those to suit any argument you want.

What about the feel of the game; the vibe as you sit there in your loungeroom? Are you enjoying the footy?

Personally, more than ever. The quality of matches, the quality of the attack, the closeness of the scores in most cases, have made it feel like rugby league again.

Sure, some of us will never recover emotionally or spiritually from watching the massacre otherwise known as “the Tigers versus Titans match in round four”, but it was a glitch in an otherwise cracking start to the season.

Some credit rests with penalties instead of set restarts for offside infringements within the 40m zone, but the coaches and football managers I’ve spoken to report they’ve now had sufficient time to shape their squads and pre-season training around the new ruck rules, which were introduced midway through 2020.

Now the NRL is talking about changing it again.

I know it doesn’t suit the Tik-Tok-140-characters-or-less-Krispy-Kreme-make-me-feel-good-right-now generation, but defence is not a bad thing. It’s half the game. It makes the game a contest, and I’d rather a contest than the cheap sugar hit of a runaway try every five minutes.

If the NRL wants to fix the ruck, it can start by teaching the referees what one looks: penalise the third man coming in late around the legs; make the ball carrier get to his feet and attempt to play the ball with his foot; and stop the numerous voluntary tackles now creeping into the game.

In other words, enforce the rules already in place.

If you needed any evidence that rugby league has jumped the shark about its rules and the interpretation thereof, you only needed to watch the grand final rematch last Friday night.

It was, by any measure, the game of the season.

Penrith play with such relentless pace, with so much skill, switching in and out of structure, from perfectly executed set plays to looney-tunes touch footy, you could watch them all night.

Souths might be one-and-three but have revealed enough in the past two weeks to suggest they can make the top four. It’s just going to take time.

But the spectacle was almost trashed because of the funky decision-making of referee Ashley Klein, or whoever is yapping in his earpiece from the grandstand.

In the 24th minute, four Panthers defenders grabbed hold of Souths fullback Latrell Mitchell and forced him over the sideline.

Klein penalised them. He’d called “held”.

“Why did you call ‘held’?” Panthers five-eighth Jarome Luai asked. “We were still moving in the tackle.”

“He’d succumbed in the tackle,” Klein replied.

According to the NRL’s own rules, a player is tackled “when, being held by an opponent, the tackled player makes it evident that he has succumbed to the tackle and wishes to be released in order to play-the-ball”.

For starters, Mitchell hadn’t succumbed at all. He was clearly still pushing with his legs.

And doesn’t this inane “succumbing” interpretation go against the basic understanding of what “held” has been for years?

That if the ball carrier is still moving, the tackle isn’t complete? When does the player carrying the ball decide when he’s tackled?

There’s a belief the current whinge about wrestling tactics are coming out of Manly, who have despaired about fullback Tom Trbojevic being strangled out of the contest.

Maybe it’s a valid gripe. Maybe the good teams have worked out how to curb his influence.

Then again, the Dally M Player of the Year didn’t look too constrained in Mudgee on Saturday night, running through Canberra like a late-night kebab, clocking 289 metres from 26 runs, including seven tackle breaks and one line break. (How good are stats?)

The slowing down of the ruck has crept into the game over many seasons, and kudos to V’landys for doing something about it when various administrations ignored it, but the balance feels right.

So leave it alone. The game is not a toy. You can’t play with the rules when you decide, or whenever a coach has a cry.

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