They removed the option of yellow for dangerous play a few years ago, reserving just for technical offences IIRC. It might have changed back but I am struggling to remember a recent instance.

Didn't foster see yellow for saints persistent offending?. Foster was just unlucky to be first player penalised after silverwood warned them.

If that was the case it was still pretty minor considering Elima's hit.

The offense is irrelevant if it was for persistent offending. Just unlucky it was the next offense.

Not quite the point I am making - What I mean is that persistent offending results in penalty after penalty. The offending team still suffer, and, when considering Elima's hit, surely that would have been deemed worse and worthy of a yellow?

Persistent offending doesn't bother me too much if the ref keeps pinging the offending team for an offence.

I thought Foster saw yellow for a professional foul?

Is the late hit on the kicker deemed a technical offence rather than a dangerous play? Or do they class that particular offence different to both?

Where's a qualified referee when you need one!

It's not a separate offence in the rules. It is just foul play. The refs were given a directive that a late hit on the kicker was an automatic 10 min sin bin, but like many things, it has seemingly died a quiet death.

That's the thing with the rules. (Apart from them needing a total rewrite that is.) You can't just look in one place and know all about whatever you need to know.

Technically it was a perfectly delivered late hit by Elima.

The real trouble with the rules is that the written version doesn't really count and to know what actually matters you have to go to the 'interpretation' currently in vogue and actually being used in games.

The problem there is that the a new 'interpretation' of the rule will be in the papers, traditionally at the start of the season, but then the RFL/referees director/refs themselves will change the new 'interpretation' to an updated, even newer version with no announcement from anyone; this updated version is often a simple reversion to where the old 'interpretation' is suddenly back in use. Through all this, the written rule will probably remain unchanged, as though they were protected like ancient parchment scrolls. At the end of the day the rules are on-line and could be changed, if there was a will to do it. It's not like they have to publish and print a paper book.

Exactly. For instance, i was watching the NRL last week and the commentators mentioned in passing that the 'encroachment' rule in Aus is now not strictly applied, and that basically a player inside the 10 will NOT be penalised unless he is 'active', a la offside in soccer. Now this is (and as has been seen on a couple of crucial recent SL incidents) a fundamental issue, and the fact that the Aussies just change the rules of the game at a whim without any consultation is absurd. As is the even more absurd situation that internationals are seemingly played under something called international rules, yet where is there a copy of the current version of those, and more to the point, there surely isn't a cat in hell's chance of all the players of all the squads somehow having knolwedge of a different set of rules than the ones they spend their lives playing under, which are bad enough.