Saxon
Bench
- Messages
- 3,187
Not just Hollywood, but the entire NRL management.I put the blame squarely on Hollywood Harrigan's shoulders.
He turned the 5m into an 8m.
He stopped penalising teams to "keep the game flowing".
He gave leg ups to teams behind in contests to "keep it interesting".
He stopped using the bin and the send off, and we started putting people on report "to keep the numbers equal".
Pundits like Gould praised him as the gold standard as shoulder charges to the head crept higher and higher.
Now we have no shoulder charges.
Now we have a generation of refs who have ignored the rule-book.
Now we have the consequences of legal action.
f**k Bill Harrigan the weaselly Super League pinup merkin.
Most of the issues with the game could have been easily controlled by the refs.
Offside? Penalise!
High tackle? Penalise!
Pressure on the neck? Penalise!
An example is third man into the tackle. When a guy is held, call it earlier and penalise if he is then thrown to the ground. The moment "held" is called, any contact from another defender is penalised.
But no, the NRL decided to allow the game to "flow" and built a rod for it's own back.
I should also mention here the greatest villain of the piece; Phil Gould in particular and channel Nein commentators in general. Their constant bagging of the refs for any attempt to control the game by penalising foul play or rule breaking. A few years ago, the League decided to apply the offside, PTB and holding in tackle rules. Penalties increased significantly, but the game was cleaning up. Gus and Joey have a whine about "ruining the game" and Greenburg threw the refs under the buss. Next week we were back to the same old shambles.
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