Quote: BumpyMcbump "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.'"
The issue is the zero tolerance on headshots is more about avoiding a lawsuit than protecting the players.
You are right sometimes there will be accidental headshots where a player had no intention to hit the head and those ones should be seen as accidents and not result in sin bins.
The ones where there is no doubt and a player is clearly trying to hurt someone should be the bin or red card depending on the severity of the shot.
Clearly the effect of of zero tolerance has seen defence become more passive. Players are worried about getting sent off or sent to the bin so the contact has changed which is worse for the game. Some argue tackle low but the game really doesn't allow just below the waist tackles as without trying to stop the ball carrier off loading we would have a game which would be so advantageous to attack that defense would become irrelevant.
As for the 6 again. Its a good rule which stops defences happy to give a way pens to either slow the game down or concede 2 points instead of a potential 6.
What it has done in the NRL is expose the sides who can't get there defensive line in shape quick enough and those who's players can't handle the speed of the game.
