Turning point was Maguire staying on after an incident no different to Macalorum's (check spelling) the week before.

The current forward pass rules seem sensible to me, but do need further clarification. "The Momentum Rule" is something created by Stevo and is not specifically mentioned in "the rules" but the equivalent interpretation in the RFL rules areDirection of Pass 1. The direction of a pass is relative to the player making it and not to the actual path relative to the ground. A player running towards his opponents’ goal line may throw the ball towards a colleague who is behind him but because of the thrower’s own momentum the ball travels forward relative to the ground. This is not a forward pass as the thrower has not
passed the ball forward in relation to himself. This is particularly noticeable when a running player makes a high, lobbed pass.[/i

To me, this makes perfect sense from a Physics perspective but it is really hard for referees, supporters, players and especially commentators to interpret. Its very subjective to the viewer and clearly not black and white but i think people who have played RL tend to know when a pass is forward by the way the ball is passed. I also think this rule needs clarifying somewhat so that there is some consistency in applying forward pass rulings.

In fact to highlight the ignorance of "the momentum rule", i once listened to a commentary from Stevo that stated that the momentum rule could not apply to a pass where the guy passing is immediately hit in a tackle from a defender after passing the ball. Clearly this is a gross misinterpretation of the "rule" as he clearly has momentum when passing that is stopped by a third party after the pass has been made. The SKY commentary team know that a "momentum rule" exists but don't really have the sense to apply it properly to real time RL situations.

I think that could be reasonably referred to as a 'momentum rule' so I don't hold that against Stevo - I agree with you though that his inane attempts to explain the issue of momentum as it applies to passing are a hindrance rather than a help, particularly when he does so with such confidence; if you were new to the game, you would reasonably expect the commentator to know what he's talking about but in this, and many other instances (salt tablet anyone?) he clearly doesn't.

A couple of things that could help in my view are firstly, that the RFL works with Sky to request that the commentary team spend less time questioning every decision the ref makes and using multiple frame by frame replays to prove he got it wrong; plenty of incidents only become controversial because Eddie and Stevo make them so by repetition. How many times do we miss the first parts of a passage of play just after a restart, because Stevo is trying to convince us by use of replays that 'the big fella came right over the top - and he didn't miss' etc etc.

Secondly, why not give the touch judge more responsibility? Force them to police the validity of passes and to assist the ref in making those calls; if you're running the line, you keep up with play and if a pass looks forward, put your bloody flag up - it seems ridiculous to have the extra human resources out there and not use them to their full value.

Alternatively, change the rule to say the pass must go backwards, but accept that you're cancelling out a very exciting aspect of the game that only the most skillful players can pull off.

[iThe direction of a pass is relative to the player making it and not to the actual path relative to the ground. A player running towards his opponents’ goal line may throw the ball towards a colleague who is behind him but because of the thrower’s own momentum the ball travels forward relative to the ground. This is not a forward pass as the thrower has not passed the ball forward in relation to himself. This is particularly noticeable when a running player makes a high, lobbed pass.[/i

This is a direct quote from the Laws and it one that every fan should read and understand. Unfortunately, most fans don't and then if they do they many don't seem to understand Newton's laws of motion, which (& I would say this as an Engineer) are quite important Laws and of course you can't break them on this planet!

The most important thing everyone needs to get there head around is that passes (and whether it is backwards or forwards) is not measured relative to the pitch. So a pass can be backwards but travel in a forward direction in relation to the pitch and it NOT be a forward pass according to the laws of the game

The principal, if explained is quite simple. So here goes!

Most decent Super League players will be able to cover around 5m/s (15 sec 100m) to 8m/s (12 sec 100m) and possibly faster over short distances, when they are running at full tilt. So, lets use 5m/s as our player running speed, because most should be able to run this fast and it makes the calcs easier!

So, our player is running straight toward the line at 5m/s and passes the ball to a fellow player who is 10m away from him horizontally along the pitch. His pass is truly flat (again, to make it easier to understand). If we ignore the fact the ball speed will decrease slightly over the 10m (not much though) due to gravity and wind resistance, again to make the calcs easier. Most players pass the ball around 20/30mph on average so that is around 8 to 13 m/s. So lets use 10m/s as the ball speed.

So, the ball takes exactly 1 second to travel 10m from player to player at a speed of 10m/s, everyone get that!

But of course, we can't forget that the player was running forward at 5m/s, so the ball will continue to move in a forward direction at 5m/s (this is a physical law) as well as 10m/s horizontally. So in that same single second the ball will have travelled 10m horizontally, it will have continued to travel forward from the point it was passed. Meaning that relative to the pitch, the ball will have travelled a whole 5m forward from the point it was passed, but the player passing the ball did not pass it forward at all!

If you start to apply this to a player who is say 3m behind (but still 10m away) the running player when the ball is passed (so well and truly passed backwards) then of course the ball will still be caught a whole 2m in front of the point it was passed relative to the pitch!!!

To make this pass truly go backwards, relative to the pitch, the player catching the ball would have to be a whole 6m behind the player passing the ball and he would catch it 1m behind the point it was passed!

When you actually start to explain this to people they start to realise that passing a rugby ball backwards is not as clear cut as they first thought and then start to understand that unless we do use a system like hawk-eye, then we can't use the video to determine forward passes.

I reckon that if we did get hawk-eye to analyse a game, ref's would probably get it right 99% of the time.

The video which pops up if you were to search for "rugby union forward pass video" shows things quite well - the RL rules follow this quite closely.

....but that 1% will all have led to Leeds tries

~Good explanation though.

By making the rule 'must go backwards' rather than 'must not go forwards', I do also mean relative to the player, not the field. As per your explanation, it would be almost impossible to have all passes backwards relative to the field. It would just change the cut off mark for forward passes, i.e. flat is forward and be perceived a lot better.