James Graham worded it best, he asked who we are trying to cater to with these rule changes and no one could answer. We all know these so-called focus groups the NRL talks about never actually happened or if they did were basically Vlandys telling everyone what he wanted and get on board or get sacked.
Imagine trying to explain to someone trying to get into the sport who doesn’t grow up with it what just happened. You can’t and it comes across as so amateurish I reckon it turns potential fans away from the game because if even die hard fans can’t understand what’s going on, what hope do newbies have?
That's the thing, all the rules are BS and applied inconsistently.
I enjoy a bit of soccer, the rules are clear. Direct contact to leg - foul, first contact with ball - no foul, offside is clear as day no interpretation bs, the ball either cross the line for a goal or it doesn't.
How do you explain NRL rules to a newbie? It's fucking impossible. Oh he held down too long, but then the next set the other team holds down for longer each time? That's a head high hit but it's play on, but the next head high is a penalty. Offisde from kickoff only gets penalised once a month, all the other times we ignore it. Are teams going back the 10? Sometimes, but they only get penalised sometimes.
If the game wants any hope of being professional we need to have more black and white interpretations in particular around the ruck where there is the most wiggle room for the ref to control the game.
A simple fix would be, 3 seconds from first contact with defender, is automatically held and all players must release within 2 seconds. I'm not saying that's a perfect fix, I haven't given it that much thought, but right now the refs have way too much control over the result.
In Soccer, refs can't change the result without being obviously corrupt, in the NRL the refs just go back 9 instead of 10, give the other team an extra half second to hold on, no one is any wiser but the result is almost guaranteed to swing to the advantaged team.