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.

Eh? Completely barking mad idea. "Active" my ar5e. How the feck does a ref have time to decide that?? It's open to wildly different interpretations.

I'm guessing that having a ref just watching the play the ball, and a ref just watching the line would help a bit?

I know, and also in this case it is directly AGAINST the rules, not a matter of interpretation, if you are offside that is it, so I don't understand how they can do it. Except they are the NRL and feel able to do what they want with their version of the rules.

Despite having two Refs on the field in the NRL there are still a few nebulous decisions seen every week. They are strong on poor hits on the last kick and mistimed tackles when a player is the air, but strangely when a player is hit in the head when in a horizontal position due to the nature of the tackle its ignored, as Benji Marshall found out recently,

I agree it is madness having different rules for different hemispheres & for internationals. I do prefer the Aussies commentators' generally more mature response to high shots. They recognise the offence but don't shriek to hysterical levels like our muppets which is then transfered to the terraces or message boards.

I don't really have a problem with the 'non-active' for the offside at kicks decisions, after all we do the same at the PTB where offside defenders are rarely penalised if they keep out of the game, and there are five officials at every game nowadays (or three + video) surely that should be enough. It's similar to the rule in soccer and they manage to police it, and it does seem a bit 'off' to knock off a score for an offence which had no bearing on the try, so maybe we could just ask the refs what they think?

What I would ask is that it's either deemed a 'trial' with a specific start and end date, or written into the rules. I'm sick of 'interpretations'.