You can guarantee that Gus is pushing a personal agenda.
He is just as likely been one of the people whinging about the wrestle and the lack of policing of ruck rules. Now that the refs are taking steps to address it, he decides he'll whinge about the amount of penalties it is causing.
I fully support the drive to enforce the rules. Get teams on side. Get players getting to their feet to play the ball. Tidy up the play the balls and that by nature slows down the ruck a little and negates the wrestle. Get teams back 10m and that gives attacks a little more time and space. Coaches can quite easily stop the penalties by coaching their sides to play the rules. This has become a Mexican standoff between the refs and the coaches - let's see who blinks first. Gould is using his media profile to put pressure on Greenburg and the refs. As much as I hate Greenburg I support his push to tidy up the game and start enforcing these rules.
I think most agree that the basic rules of the game that have been twisted and turned in recent years need to be clamped down on.
My issue, as with most things this administration, is the way they go about it. It’s one thing for them to state the bleeding obvious and say we need to fix it, it’s another thing entirely to come up with the right way to achieve it.
1 Why do we get teams in every game getting 5 , 6, 7 penalties in a row then as sure as night follows day the other team gets the same run of penalties. The indisciplined team becomes perfect and the perfect team becomes a rabble in 10 minutes. It is absolute garbage.
2 Why do the run of penalties come almost always in the red zone? The rest of the field it seems is inhabited by perfect footballers plying their craft honestly and fairly. And they are so f... img stupid they don’t realise that the hardest place to attack is close to the line and teams couldn’t give a toss about conceding. It took them 8 rounds to work this out and use the bin and now it’s a goddamn mess with no one knowing how many / where on field will result in a sin bin.
If they had just binned players after two or 3 deliberate penalties in Round 1 wherever they were on the field this rubbish wouldn’t be happening. And keep doing it! Not just look to find a way to square it up later. Teams are just taking the odds to it at the moment that if we lose one to the bin it will happen to the other mob when they get their run so the clowns can say they are evenhanded. How many penalty square ups do we see? Do they think we are all imbeciles.
3 When did the knock on rule change to include knock backs. Do they have their eyes painted on? They adjudicate ( badly ) on forward passes but if you drop the ball in any direction play stops.It is so entrenched now that the commentators just say that it’s a knock on regardless. In essence we have created a new beast “ the Rugby League knock on “ which is a 360 degree animal designed to slow down a game already stopping every 2 minutes for something else. It is an absolute joke.Any attempt to fix this ? NO
4 And now ,even while they issue 30 penalties , they STILL manage to coach the players and respectfully address them by their nick names.Any change here NO
5 Attacking players walk two metres forward trampling the marker and what happens ? Go back and play it ffs. The defenders hand gets anywhere near the ball and they whistle so f..ing hard you can’t hear yourself think. Half the play the balls are like this !So of course the attacking team walks off the mark all the time because THERE IS NO CONSEQUENCE!! Easy fix , penalise the attacking side. But NO we can’t becausr some moron thought it was a good idea a few years back.
These are just a few .The list is endless. A simple , tough , uncompromising game has become a farce.
So they pretend to clean up the game by concentrating on where blokes feet are in red zone defence and virtually nothing else other than foot touching ball, make the game like Union with each passing moment as fatigue ceases to become an issue due to the penaltyathon and generally confuse everyone with this ridiculous obstruction rubbish and expect to receive a medal for their new found zeal in enforcing the rules.
Our game is enforced by morons , run by fools and commentated on in most part by lowest common denominator idiots.
It’s a shambles and their ham fisted crackdown ain’t fooling anyone.