Why NRL isn't worried about Magic Round farce
NRL chief executive Andrew Abdo isn't worried that last week's high tackle drama will dominate the headlines at Magic Round, with a directive for the bunker to get involved less frequently set to lead to fewer sin bins in Brisbane.
There were 18 sin bins in a chaotic round 8, with fans frustrated by bunker intervention for minor offences where the game would be paused and players would be marched for incidents that had occurred a minute earlier.
Foul play has been a hot topic this year, with data showing high tackles have been on the rise, leading to a whopping $104,650 in fines being handed out, while players have missed a combined 54 weeks through suspension.
Abdo is confident players won't stay down in a bid to get the bunker involved this weekend, with the game's boss backing the on-field action to dominate the headlines after a crackdown overshadowed Magic Round four years ago.
'I'm not worried,' he said.
'The players are professionals and the referees know what they're doing.
'They'll make a call based on the incidents they see in front of them regardless of what happens in and around it, so I'm not concerned about that at all.
'Clearly, we want the focus to be on football.'
Bulldogs veteran Kurt Mann said on Wednesday that it was unfair for people to suggest that players should simply lower their target zone when making tackles given things can happen in a split second before contact.
Roosters coach Trent Robinson agreed with that sentiment and said teams couldn't train their players differently this week just because the interpretations had slightly changed.
'Nobody goes out there to hit anybody high,' he said ahead of his side's clash with the Dolphins.
'You can't ask someone in the middle of the game not to do it. You have to train it and train it and train it, and that's a process.
'Whether that shifts interpretation in a week or not, we don't want them (high tackles) anyway, so you keep training it and you want that to reduce.
'It doesn't change anything in a week with how you want to approach a game because no one has that as a goal anyway.'
While the NRL is adamant that there hasn't been a crackdown on high contact in recent weeks, fans are still frustrated that the game is adjudicated differently from one week to the next.
'It's not a complete shift, but when it's small, subtle changes over the course of a few weeks, you can look back in a month and say 'geez it was different a month ago than what it is today',' Robinson said.
'And that's simply what's happened in a small way.
'Nobody meant to do it, nobody really tried to shift the dial too much, but when you do slightly, it moves the interpretations a bit, so we've got to recalibrate that a little bit.
'We've got a great sport, that's why we're talking about it. It's so fast and intense, and so contact for our sport is more than any other, so we can't look at other sports and say this is how we should do things.'
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