Old man shouting at … well just about everything

The Age

08-08-2025

With its crackdown on post-try celebrations, the NRL is onto something. Just not what it thinks it's onto.
Wests Tigers players were served with a breach notice for their use of the gesture known as a 'khawd', a finger move only accessible to those with good digital coordination and no arthritis. It looks like a middle C piano key that goes down and gets stuck. For the NRL, this was risk management: clamping down on an action pending a culturally sensitive investigation of what, if anything, it might mean.
As my friend Michael Chammas explained, a khawd might mean a lot of things, but first and foremost, it must be pronounced correctly, 'like you're clearing your throat, finished off with an 'awd' that is said with the kind of passion the Tigers finally played with on Sunday'. Apparently, you can 'khawd' your own grandmother if you do it in the right spirit, but not if she's a Bulldogs fan.
So, enough of khawdgate. (Pause to clean my keyboard; khawding clearly needs practice.) What the NRL has really clicked onto is its overdue need to do something about celebrations in general. Especially the choreographed ones. The more choreographed the action, the bigger the breach.
The khawd is nothing; let's see some motion on the biggest blight on the game.
In the NRL, the artistry in a try-scoring movement is quickly swamped by the artistry of players conducting a circular Morris dance, imitating a dog lifting its leg, making special non-Auslan sign language, performing baroque hand-pitapats and cat's cradles, or, if the players have really prepared themselves, all of the above. By the time it's over, someone reminds them that they've scored points, but they're busy having more fun than they've had since pre-school. I assume it was fun those NRLW players were having when they celebrated with one player going on all fours while her teammates pretended (presumably) to milk her. Four points were not enough. There have to be judges who would give it a perfect 10.
When I see my team hybridising Marcel Marceau and Humphrey B. Bear after scoring a try, all I can think is that they should have spent a little less time practising this jazz and a little more time learning how to pass from their left or putting the ball down without spilling it. I ask myself: Would Craig Bellamy allow this? Only if he's stormed out the back of the grandstand, maybe. Probably not.
I'd like to think Bellamy would tell over-celebrating players to find a mirror and take a good long look at themselves. But at some clubs, that would be courting the risk of said players taking a longer look while fixing their braids or making interesting calligraphy with their clippers.