18th club, whose next?

[Dark Corner]

The quality of the product on the pitch is the worst it's ever been.

In the offseason between 2019 and 2020 the NRL went from the most competitive and unpredictable competition on the planet, where any team could beat any other on their day, to one of the, if not the, most predictable competitions with a salary cap on the planet, and the little tweaks they've made around the edges over the last few years haven't really changed that.

The post was just a bunch off observations about the rules and refereeing collected together, and didn't really touch on my understanding of the game itself at all, but if it was such nonsense you'd have been able to refute it easily instead of resorting to attacking me personally...

The truth is that I've watched RL for decades, I played for decades, volunteered in the grassroots for years, reffed, coached, etc, etc, and the fact that it's a social taboo to say it in these circles doesn't change that every major rule change that's been made over the last 4 seasons has objectively made the game worse, and the average standard of refereeing has been steadily getting worse in recent times.

It's not bad compared to Rugby Union.

 

[Wb1234]

Danes right about how poor the nrl rn

this was a record breaking year for crowds and tv but the standard of play was poor

upsets are rare and Penrith are too far ahead of everyone else

it’s not the arlc fault it’s the lazy clubs fault who aren’t doing their job properly

 

[AlwaysGreen]

So the secret to getting big crowds is having a poor standard of play?

Maybe AFL Red's mob have been right all along.

 

[Dark Corner]

Please can we just celebrate this season with great crowds and hopefully the NRL and clubs sorted out the issues but I loved this season and same some great plays that if it was Rugby Union would be described as EPIC.

 

[Ride the Lion to Zion]

The post was just a bunch off observations about the rules and refereeing collected together, and didn't really touch on my understanding of the game itself at all, but if it was such nonsense you'd have been able to refute it easily instead of resorting to attacking me personally...

It's off topic, but I'll have a stab at refuting a couple of the worst.

Your claim that refs ignore most forward passes implies that a pass should be called forward unless it has clearly travelled backwards. A level pass doesn't meet this criterion. Neither does every pass where momentum is a factor. The consequences of reversing the benefit of the doubt like this would be disastrous. Flat passes and short passes would be deemed too risky and disappear from the game. A player running at speed would have to stop before passing.

You also asserted that refs take too long to call "Held". According to the rulebook, an upright tackle should be called complete, "When the attacking player is held in such a manner that they can make no further progress and cannot part with the ball". Note the second element. The Warriors try on Saturday off a Mitch Barnett late offload was a perfect example of why refs need to read tackles intelligently and not make the call purely in terms of time. That try wouldn't have happened with an early call of "Held".

 

[Perth Red]

Cant give more to peter, and expect paul not to complain

Have you seen our taxation system?

 

[blue bags]

I would have up too 24 teams
Central Coast north Bear's
2nd Penrith team. Penrith wolves
2nd Newcastle team. Hunter Mariners
All 3 teams. Area's huge amount of juniors
And huge amounts of fan's
All 3 fantastic stadium's
And maybe brand new stadium in Penrith
And take alot of notice and consideration of the NRLW growth in these areas
Would have a Live game in Penrith and Newcastle every weekend
And practically same for Central coast Gosford stadium. With Bear's
Eagles. Mariners playing there
All 3 areas are massively growing with population getting bigger every year

 

[Perth Red]

I would have up too 24 teams
Central Coast north Bear's
2nd Penrith team. Penrith wolves
2nd Newcastle team. Hunter Mariners
All 3 teams. Area's huge amount of juniors
And huge amounts of fan's
All 3 fantastic stadium's
And maybe brand new stadium in Penrith
And take alot of notice and consideration of the NRLW growth in these areas
Would have a Live game in Penrith and Newcastle every weekend
And practically same for Central coast Gosford stadium. With Bear's
Eagles. Mariners playing there
All 3 areas are massively growing with population getting bigger every year

Given each new clubs costs the NRL $17-20mill how would you pay for these 24 clubs?

 

[blue bags]

Given each new clubs costs the NRL $17-20mill how would you pay for these 24 clubs?

Private enterprise
Television money
Government funding
Combination with NRL investments
Just like Gold coast Titans
And the Dolphins

 

[LimeRick]

I would have up too 24 teams
Central Coast north Bear's
2nd Penrith team. Penrith wolves
2nd Newcastle team. Hunter Mariners
All 3 teams. Area's huge amount of juniors
And huge amounts of fan's
All 3 fantastic stadium's
And maybe brand new stadium in Penrith
And take alot of notice and consideration of the NRLW growth in these areas
Would have a Live game in Penrith and Newcastle every weekend
And practically same for Central coast Gosford stadium. With Bear's
Eagles. Mariners playing there
All 3 areas are massively growing with population getting bigger every year

Three new teams within 120km of Sydney Harbour. That sounds like rugby league expansion.

For the love of God, get out of NSW. You're not growing the game that way, you're fracturing your audiences.

 

[blue bags]

Three new teams within 120km of Sydney Harbour. That sounds like rugby league expansion.

For the love of God, get out of NSW. You're not growing the game that way, you're fracturing your audiences.

With 24 teams. We can have the bear's back. And Mariners back
Penrith 2nd team aswell
The whole 3 areas has massive populations growth
The stadium's
And fan's. Juniors

 

[Perth Red]

Three new teams within 120km of Sydney Harbour. That sounds like rugby league expansion.

For the love of God, get out of NSW. You're not growing the game that way, you're fracturing your audiences.

Hes trolling, no-one thinks another 3 NSW clubs is a good idea lol

 

[The Great Dane]

It's off topic, but I'll have a stab at refuting a couple of the worst.

Your claim that refs ignore most forward passes implies that a pass should be called forward unless it has clearly travelled backwards. A level pass doesn't meet this criterion. Neither does every pass where momentum is a factor. The consequences of reversing the benefit of the doubt like this would be disastrous. Flat passes and short passes would be deemed too risky and disappear from the game. A player running at speed would have to stop before passing.

It implies no such thing. That's just a strawman.

Referees are regularly ignoring blatant forward passes. On average it happens multiple times a game (some times it's ridiculous), and it hasn't been unusual for it to be a factor in teams losing matches.

It's not the only example either.

You also asserted that refs take too long to call "Held". According to the rulebook, an upright tackle should be called complete, "When the attacking player is held in such a manner that they can make no further progress and cannot part with the ball". Note the second element. The Warriors try on Saturday off a Mitch Barnett late offload was a perfect example of why refs need to read tackles intelligently and not make the call purely in terms of time. That try wouldn't have happened with an early call of "Held".

Yeah and the addition of that second element was a f**king stupid idea. All it's done is add an unnecessary level of subjectivity to when a player is held that is literally impossible to adjudicate consistently, which makes it inherently unfair and leads to accusations of, lets say, unequal treatment, whether they're fair or not. Also, a try from a late offload isn't impressive or exciting when it isn't earned...

Loose carry is another similar example of an unnecessary layer of subjectivity that's been inserted into the game, with predictably munted outcomes. There're plenty of other examples of subjective, nitpicky, bull shit, that's been inserted into the game in recent times that have objectively made it worse as well.

 

[Dark Corner]

With 24 teams. We can have the bear's back. And Mariners back
Penrith 2nd team aswell
The whole 3 areas has massive populations growth
The stadium's
And fan's. Juniors

I always if Rugby Union died off a bit in New Zealand or a coming together of codes then a Trans Tasman NRL with the Super Rugby sides in and 24-26 teams but it's just my Pie in the Sky.

 

[blue bags]

Hes trolling, no-one thinks another 3 NSW clubs is a good idea lol

The stadium's
The population
The juniors
The fans
They are all there in massive growth areas
We need to grow NRLW aswell
We add Perth Pirates
Adelaide Ram's
Brisbane 3rd team
Melbourne 2nd team
Thats 24 teams

 

[LimeRick]

With 24 teams. We can have the bear's back. And Mariners back
Penrith 2nd team aswell
The whole 3 areas has massive populations growth
The stadium's
And fan's. Juniors

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

You're proposing a 24-team competition, but 13 teams are within a 120-km radius of Sydney. Where less than a quarter of the Australian/NZ population live.

Expansion is a chance to dilute the Sydney teams, to turn it into a a real national/regional competition. Your plan dooms it to NSWRL-lite.

You don't have to expand for expansion's sake. If there are no more options outside of NSW, then it's a good stopping point. There's a diminishing return on TV rights as more games mean more overlapping timeslots and smaller audiences per game.

 

[The Great Dane]

Hypothetically you could successfully add more teams in Sydney/NSW if you went about it the right way.

The main reason that adding more teams from NSW, and Qld to a lesser extent, is a bad idea ATM is because there's finite space in the competition in it's current structure. In other words, there's only roughly 20-22 spots in the league ATM before it becomes bloated and unsustainable, and adding another NSW/Qld team means that a team from another market without representation has to miss out, and that's a compromise that the NRL can't afford to make.

However, there's no reason why you couldn't add more teams from NSW if you restructured the competition so that it could support more teams in NSW without negatively impacting the other markets, especially if you could lower the barriers of entry and change the measure of successful expansion from profitable to just sustainable without that significantly harming the broader product. In fact I'd go so far as to say that that would be the ideal outcome.

The problem is that the way that that's been achieved in most of the world is either with conferences, that won't work in the NRL because the competition is too heavily geographically weighted in favour of Sydney, or the pyramid, but the gap between the professional and amateur level is way too wide for that to be sustainable in Australia.

The only way I think you could achieve it would be with a modified version of the top down licensed P&R system like in Japanese soccer, but that would require an unprecedented level of cooperation from every level of the sport. Everybody from ARLC down would have to be supportive, and I just can't see that happening in Australian RL.

The ARLC is too compromised and set in their ways to even consider such a radical (by Australian standards) idea, the clubs would start SL 2.0 rather than risk dropping out of the top tier, and the broadcasters are too myopic and risk averse to even truly understand what the ARLC would be trying to achieve, let alone support it.

TL;DR: hypothetically it could be done, that might even be the ideal outcome, but it'll never happen.

 

[Wb1234]

I always if Rugby Union died off a bit in New Zealand or a coming together of codes then a Trans Tasman NRL with the Super Rugby sides in and 24-26 teams but it's just my Pie in the Sky.

Ba patient that will happen

professional rugby union has been a bust around the world and the nrl has now surpassed the lot of them combined

 

[Brian potter]

Ba patient that will happen

professional rugby union has been a bust around the world and the nrl has now surpassed the lot of them combined

Not so sure about European competitions but the super rugby comps are on thin ice and it will be interesting to see the state of play in say the next 5-10 years.

 

[Ride the Lion to Zion]

Referees are regularly ignoring blatant forward passes.

A pass is legal unless officials are certain it travelled forward out of the hands. Same as you are innocent till proven guilty not guilty till proven innocent. This is basic logic, whether on the RL field or in a courtroom.

In my view, there's too much random guesswork at the moment. Refs do sometimes miss forward passes. They also sometimes wrongly call forward passes. The real difference lies in the reaction -

Ref wrongly calls forward pass - line is drawn and incident forgotten.

Ref misses forward pass - buffoons go nuts and make wild accusations.

Also, a try from a late offload isn't impressive or exciting when it isn't earned

Second-phase play off a late offload is fully earned.

The tackle and ruck is a contest. If defenders are unable or unwilling to complete the tackle by bringing the ball-carrier to ground, he must be given every chance to pass the ball out of the tackle. Defenders should not be bailed out by a premature call of "Held". If quick calls became the norm, we'd end up with glorified Touch Football.