I think wide to West caused more damage to the Bulls fortunes

now THAT one was cheating. Apart from it never being a penalty in the first place, Saints took the pen and were allowed to play on despite at least two players being several yards blatantly offside. A refs memo alleging the refs would be clamping down on offside at restarts having funnily enough just been publicized that very day. Oh yes. Cheated.

The wide to bstrd west moment occasionally is shown with little warning in some sort of montage of doom. Despite my best efforts it unleashes some sort of primal anger in me whereby I rush furiously for the remote control. If I can't find it I hide in the kitchen or kick the telly.

You have a very perceptive daughter. ....and, of course they do "just fall to the ground", and invariably quite without sanction.
This usually occurs when players are near the boundary lines and perceive they may be in danger of being pushed out of the paddock or into the in-goal area and therefore having to concede possession. Catch the ball and hit the ground is the accepted tactic in such circumstances. Joynt though, he did it blatantly, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PITCH. That broke the unwritten rule about where it is ok to break the rules. Sine die wouldn't have been long enough.

Good lad!

Meh. You are just another one that doesn't understand the rule. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether I'm the only one who does understand the damn thing. Which is odd, as it's not difficult.

Read the rule again, but this time morecarefully



Now analyse it. The question is, can I legally DELIBERATELY ALLOW MYSELF TO BE TACKLED BY VOLUNTARILY FALLING ON THE GROUND? Yes or no?

The answer is, of course "YES"! But that simple fact is what seems to escape 99% of observers! Why? because they aren't used to carefully reading, I suppose.

The only time my deliberate voluntary falling down IS illegal is if, AS WELL AS doing it "deliberately", I also do it "UNNECESSARILY".

That is, BOTH elements are needed to break the rule. If I fall unnecessarily, that's OK, if i didn't do it deliberately. And if i do it deliberately then that's OK oo, - as long as it was not done unnecessarily.

What you need to therefore know is, what constitutes "unnecessarily"? I would think it perfectly reasonable to argue "it was necessary for me to do that, because otherwise I could have ended up in goal and conceded a drop-out."

But, the rule doesn't define what MIGHT BE "NECESSARILY" AND WHAT MIGHT NOT, AND SO IT IS ENTIRELY UP TO THE INTERPRETATION OF THE REFS. If they deem that the deliberate drop was done "necessarily" then it is play on.

If trying to prevent a dropout isn't, for a pro player, necessary, then I don't know what else the word in the rule could have in mind.

very perceptive FA. clearly it was deliberate, so deliberate that Deacon saw it coming and moved out of the way. And in doing so ensured that Joynt unnecessarily fell to the ground. so on the face of it both conditions met. and so clearly, against all the values that made England great, nautural justice, sportsmanship, never cheating or taking drugs, not betting on your team, etc etc it was not a voluntary tackle.

However it was not a voluntary tackle for different excuses (I simply cannot use the word reason in this context). The letter I got back from the RFL as a response to my "we was robbed" letter to them querying the decision actually made no reference at all to deliberate and unnecessary. What it referred to was some arrangement that the RFL and referees and clubs had come to at the start of the season regarding tackles. They had come up with two options, one chosen by Saints and epitomised by them the whole of that season and the Joynt voluntary tackle. IIRC you could either throw yourself at your tackler and down in which case because it was a fast PtB the other side were not as tightly refereed for infringements eg not square etc or choice no 2 you stayed upright and the opposition had to put you down but they were mercilessly refereed for infringements in the tackle and at the rather slow PtB. Each club had to elect for one or the other. Saints elected to throw themselves to the ground. So Joynt was perfectly entitled to throw himself at Deacon. But Deacon was not entitled to deliberately move away from the tackle, ie a voluntary non-tackle.

I know that this sounds as if I have made it up. Well, actually the RFL have made it up. I wish I had kept the letter so I could have posted it up, but I kid you not, the RFL - in fact Stuart Cummins - explained it that way. I was so disgusted I burnt the letter. In essence, because it was a non-tackle, it was therefore not a voluntary tackle. And I can point to a bit of circumstantial evidence, that Saints that season threw themselves at the tackler on numerous occasions, and it used to annoy the hell out of me. To be told that the RFL had told them they could do that was like putting a match to Stanlow Refinery.

And for those of you about to post a response, yes I did write back pointing out that nowhere in the rules does it say that a player has to make a tackle, so they were talking complete dribble, but I did not get a reply. perhaps they were fed up with being told they were idiots.

"A player in possession shall not deliberately and unnecessarily allow himself to be tackled by voluntarily falling to the ground when not held by an opponent."
Whilst agreeing with FA to come extent surely there are 3 not 2 elements to the rule. Deliberately and unnecessarily are two but the third element is 'allow himself to be tackled'. Therefore a player (who for the sake of argument we will call Joynt) that runs up to two players and throws himself to the ground has only fulfilled two of the conditions in that he has deliberately and unnecessarily gone to ground nut has not allowed himself to be tackled until a tackle is completed. If the wording of the rule was changed to "A player in possession shall not deliberately and unnecessarily with the intention of allowing himself to be tackled by voluntarily falling to the ground when not held by an opponent" then he would have committed said offence. Numerous examples of voluntary tackles were committed by Saints at this time whereby the players would run into tacklers and throw themselves to the ground with the intention of dropping and then jumping up for a quick play the ball. This led to the referees shouting out that the player had submitted to the tackle and the defenders had longer to lay on when the ref should have just penalised him.

FA is quite correct in his main point though; the opinion of the referee is paramount in judging what actually occurred.

We all believe that a try is scored by a player putting weight on the ball in the in-goal area, but not so - all that is necessary, is that in the [iopinion of the referee[/i this occurred, the [iactuality[/i is irrelevant.

It's a little like the old 'spot the ball' competitions in the papers [going back a bit I know]. These, soccer based, competitions used a press photograph with the ball removed and contestants had to guess/ divine /use skill to work out, exactly where the ball was. However, when judging the winners, they didn't do what I would have regarded as the obvious method, ie to just go back to the original photo [complete with ball] and see who was nearest - Oh no, they had a much better idea. They got a panel of 'experts' [ I kid you not] to look at the piccie with no ball and assess its true position - and the winner was the person with the nearest X to their 'expert panel's' guess. Rather like the RFL, they reserved all rights, didn't allow appeals and the Editor's decision was final, of course..

So there you have it. The laws of rugby league are on the same level as a tawdry newspaper 'spot the ball' competition.

er actually per my earlier post its a bit more complicated than that. There are two levels of rugby league law, one that FA would recognise as those laws enacted by our dear MPs in Whitehall and that appear in black and white even in digital form, and the other the practical application/interpretation of those in case law. except in the RFLs case it was secret case law that you don't tell the fans about. It is that level that is the spot the ball. I have no problem with them getting together at the start of the season and agreeing on the interpretation of the play the ball for the season provided they told the fans about it. It would have saved me a whole season of apoplexy when Saints forever dived at the oncoming tackler. But their embarassing attempts to explain it indicate to me that they knew the fans would find it unintelligible, and not because the fans are stupid, quite the opposite. And those spot the ball competitions used to annoy me too, the panel were barking mad most of the time.

and interestingly they do now announce changes to not just the laws but how they are interpreted, at the start of the season. So we can moan for a whole season, not just the grand final.

Spot on, the reason so many perplexing reffing omissions / bloopers/ misses are made is probably 99% of the time because the refs are playing to a script written for them outside the actual rules. I too would have no great issue with that (same for all) if I only could be bloody well told what the fsck the "rule" is.

One glaring example is the PTB. Nobody has sent me a letter of confirmation, but it is 100% certainly the case that the reason referees ignore persistent and delibertae ignoring of the LAW to place the ball on the ground, and to then play it with the foot, is because this LAW has been disapplied by the back door. It isn't a question of "interpretation" either. When I see players barely lift their off the floor and immediately roll the ball to the acting half, maybe under a cursorily raised boot, it isn't as if there could be the slightest argument that the LAW has been comprehensively infringed.

The ethos of rugby league is to not get too hung up on the rules because we can't have the game slowing down for so much as a nanosecond. If you like rugby with a myriad of rules rigidly applied I believe there's a popular 15 a side version available.

Instead we have scrums that involve leaning gently near other players, one of which has the job of ensuring the ball doesn't go inbetween the opposition players (if the opposition got near it imagine the wasted seconds).

The quick play the ball needs looking at as currently it takes up so much time needlessly. Ideally I'd like to see people cutting to the chase and playing the ball before they get it.

This is the problem with the modern world - no-one has time for anything. I bet some folk today go shopping and don't even stop for tea and cakes, lots of them don't even [igo[/i shopping 'cos they use that interweb thingy - just no patience. Don't know what the world is coming to - going to the devil in a handcart if you ask me.

Speed speed speed, faster faster faster, that's all we hear - they won't be happy until rugby is played at 100 miles per hour with no defences and a try scored on every possession and we'd be wishing someone would just grab the ball and lie down for a bit of a rest.. The biggest shock then will be when a team with the ball [idoesn't[/i score after every other pass. Mind, I think we've been beaten to that by basketball....

Fill in the gaps. Can we put out a full team of people who played for Bradford AND Saint Helens?

1.
2. Jamie Foster
3. Paul Newlove
4. Paul Loughlin
5.
6. Lee Gaskell
7.
8. Paul Anderson
9.
10. Sonny Nickle
11. Paul Clough
12. Lee Gilmour
13. Bernard Dwyer

Harry Pinner