One day, rugby league is going to eat itself, like a man eating his own head. And on Friday night at Suncorp Stadium, it started nibbling away. During the elimination final between Brisbane and Gold Coast, rugby league reached peak hysteria when the NRL’s much-maligned bunker made a decision, went to the board and got the call 100% correct – and people bayed for their blood.
See the incident in your head: it’s the 10th minute, Broncos centre Jordan Kahu bangs away down the left before Konrad Hurrell tackles him almost on the line. Kahu reaches around to plant the ball on the try-line but Hurrell kicks the ball from Kahu’s grasp. The referee on the spot, Gerard Sutton, who can see the ball hasn’t been planted, signals “No Try” but throws the decision off to the bunker to check what exactly happened.
Now, you can’t kick the ball out of someone’s hands. You can’t kick at an opponent, period. If you do it’s a penalty. If you do it in the act of someone about to slam the ball over the try-line and score a try, it’s a penalty try. It’s in the rules. There’s no “interpretation”. It’s black-and-white. End of story. Yet it wasn’t end of story. It was the story.
For there we were looking at replays when Peter Sterling – who along with Phil Gould would be considered the great sage of Channel Nine’s talking heads – said: “One thing we know for sure, it’s not a try.” Gloriously, less than a beat of a butterfly’s wing later, the Kentucky Fried Chicken big screen flashed it up: “TRY”. Penalty try, in fact. And underneath the posts Sutton went. “That’s not a penalty try,” opined sideline man Brad Fittler. “At what point in our history did that become a try?’’ asked Gould.
And the Titans-leaning Twitter-sphere agreed. And there followed a thousand mad memes and malarkey, and ill-founded opinion, and such-forth in these immediate, connected, ever-babbling modern times.
Yet to answer Gould’s question, it became a try when someone put it in the rule book and asked referees to adjudicate according to that rule book. For there it is in Section 15.1.a under “Player’s Misconduct”. “A player is guilty of misconduct if he trips, kicks or strikes another player.” In Section 6 there’s this: “The referee may award a penalty try if, in his opinion, a try would have been scored but for the unfair play of the defending team.”
So there you go. Penalty try. You can’t kick your opponent, even if you’re only trying to kick the ball. And you definitely can’t complain about adjudicators ruling according to the rules of the game.
Afterwards Gould tweeted: “I don’t think I’ve ever felt more deflated after calling a game of football. I didn’t care which team won tonight. But I care for the game.”
Darryl Brohman was similarly flat: “I am absolutely deflated after calling that game. The officiating and the technology has absolutely ruined what I thought would be a beauty.”
Now, these men have a case. For the referees in the particular fixture (and indeed throughout the weekend) made mistakes. Corey Oates leapt onto David Mead’s back in the middle of a contest for a bomb and Mead was penalised when Oates landed hard. James Roberts lashed out with his boot at a prone Ryan Simpkins. You’re not allowed to do that, it’s in Section 15. Yet Roberts played the ball and the Broncos scored in the next play, and they couldn’t go to the bunker because play-the-ball can’t be checked.
There were other errors, and the Broncos got the rub of them but that, people, is life. Mistakes happen. In rugby league, in sport, in business, in the even greater game of all called life. They always have and they always will. There was never a golden era of refereeing; Bill Harrigan made errors, Greg Hartley made errors. Kevin Roberts, Keith Page, whoever watched Dally Messenger tossing the ball over the line, they all made mistakes.
The NRL’s administrators, in their efforts to appease fans and media and hysterical, shrill kooks everywhere, have thrown a heap of money at this bunker business, and it has resulted in less errors. By rewinding the game in real time and checking on things, adjudicators are able to get most things right. More than they did, anyway. Yet, ironically, counter-intuitively, rugby league is not a better game because of it. You would think it would be, but it’s not. For in an effort to “perfect” the game, officialdom has slowed it down. And each seminal play is dissected to the last pixel in a $2 million tech-heavy off-site bunker. And those adjudicators do get most things right. They are consistent. It’s at the expense of common sense, occasionally, but you can’t demand consistency and whine when you get it.
Another repercussion of getting things mostly right is that those mistakes that are made – on-field, in the bunker – are highlighted manifold. And when that happens, everyone loses their mind.
Corey Parker is nigh-on the oldest and wisest man still bumping ugly on the league field. He was on radio after the Titans match saying video adjudication is a side of the game that needs to be “cleaned up”. And he didn’t mean wiped out. He meant tinkered with, to make it more correct, again. But he’s wrong, for on that path lies more madness.
Trying to “clean up” rugby league (read: make it perfect) has led to where we are now. The game is slowed down. There are long moments of waiting. On-field referees are adjudicating on how their decision will affect the game (and how their performance is later marked by a jury of their peers). They’re covering themselves by sending most everything upstairs. And who could blame them? Whether they get it right or wrong, they’re yelled at anyway.
So to hell with perfect, to hell with clean. There can never be clean. Rugby league needs to brush video replays for all but grounding. And then everyone needs to learn acceptance. Fans, media, players, everyone, has to accept there will be errors. And to just move on, and acknowledge that in the hurly burly of a game of footy that referees are human and make mistakes, as do players, officials, fans, talking heads in the box, every last one us.
Yet instead the NRL will continue on a doomed, Quixotic quest for perfection in a game that never can be perfect because it’s played by humans who are not and never will be. And thus the game will be slowed. And refs will still get calls wrong and we’ll yell at them and each other when they do. And there we’ll be, eating our own head.
