Quote: Saddened! "The NRL is also a complete mess too. Their six again implementation is no better than our's and it's hated by the fans. Their crackdown on high shots also made the game farcical for a month or so and I suspect we have that to come.'"
Cracking down on high shots isn't farcial, it's about modifying how participants play the sport, it needs to continue and expanded to neck tackling, well it needs to continue if we are actually really as bothered about player welfare as the words seem to imply.
The problem with some of the interpretations by both on field and disciplinary is that there's a failure to understand kinetic energy/pyhsiology of humans in motion and how fast the human brain can determine an ever changing environment or motion of other players actions or state of motion.
Whence a player decides to make contact/ a tackle they are making that decision a certai period before the contact is made, sometimes you can adjust how that cntact is made leading up to it, however there are a fair few occasions in every match were the time between your initial decision to make contact and what's unfolding in front of you is too short for the human brain to decipher (reaction time) and even if it could, your physical motion (kinetic energy) canot simply be moved or stopped in that time frame to avoid the contact point you were aiming for. Thus head high shots occur when the initial movement was legitimate.
Penalising players severely on the back of those instances is not just wrong but unjust and ignorant, it could lead to a fundamental change in contact sport and not for the better. We only need to look at how gridiron decided to 'protect' its participants and the outcome from that has been a pandemic of brain injuries (to the extent of suicide to alleviate the symtpoms of CTE) and massive injury increases in other parts of the body, this mostly due to the effects of the intervention. So rugby either goes down the headgear route (very bad), it becomes a soft contact sport, which means its no longer rugby as we know it, or it lives with the fact that in some instances injuries/contact to the head cannot be avoided.
