Question: if someone grabbed your nuts and tried to rip them from your body and you slash out with a punch, do you deserve 10 minutes in the bin?
Good points, and I'm with you, there has to be a place for punishment that's based on contextual nuances. There's a difference between punching someone for just about no reason and punching someone because they've punched you five times in a row for no reason. The legal system understands the difference, courts understand the difference, judges understand the difference.
I made the point earlier in this thread, or could be I made it in another discussion, that a lot of the fighting we see isn't necessarily the result of bad rules but bad refereeing.
Allowing myself to be serious for just a moment, I reckon you could do much more to stop fighting by cutting out the actual niggle and penalising players for that than you would giving harsher punishment for people throwing punishment.
Even if you think fighting is unacceptable in all circumstances, and some people think that, you'd have to concede that in quite a number of cases players fighting is understandable.
Players often fight and throw punches because they have no faith in the referees to do their job. We've seen it so many times, a game will boil over because the ref turns a blind eye to bullshit in the tackle or in the play the ball. If we took this this origin as one example, and I don't care if you go the blues or the maroons, both fights took place because the referee didn't blow his whistle at two obvious acts of illegality. In game 1 Gallen stiff-armed Myles in the head, the ref ignored it and so a fight took place. You could say, and I'd personally agree with you, that Myles is guilty of cheap shots and had the stiff arm coming, but even so you would have to concede that the ref ignored a cheap shot somewhere along the line, no matter who it came from. Then switch to game 2, what happened? Gallen was lying all over the tackled player for an eternity, so Tate in his frustration pushed him the f**k out of there, and Merrin reacted to that.
Two examples aren't conclusive but in almost all cases, if you pay attention, fights come about because the referees are soft on bullshit niggling and cheap shots. Players take it into their own hands because they have zero confidence in the referees to do anything about it.
That's why there needs to be context, referees need to show discretion. Tate should have been sin binned last year for his punch on Bird, imo, but there's no way on earth that he deserved to be sin binned in game 2 of origin 2013.
We disagreed on shoulder charges but I think ironically I point I made in defence of the shoulder charge is just as relevant here. The point being that we wouldn't be having the discussion in the first place if the referees enforced already existing rules. Shoulder changes came under scrutiny mainly because idiot refs allowed for years players to run around shoulder charging people in the FACE. That your post and my response only exist because referees are too incompetent or scared to act on the rules that have been in place for decades.
Merrin and the referees are the only guilty party in this weeks origin.
