The NRL's head of football Graham Annesley has confirmed the referees and bunker were correct to not award a penalty after Reuben Garrick was taken out in mid-air by Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad on Friday evening.
Under the current NRL rules, a player should only be penalised for tackling an opponent in the air if they have attempted to catch the ball on the full.
In Friday's game, Garrick was taken out by New Zealand Warriors fullback Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad after the ball had bounced, landing on his back.
Annesley, who said the landing was safe as Garrick had fallen on his back, explained that based on the rules, the referee made the right decision, and given the way Garrick landed, there was no need for the incident to be penalised.
"I just wanted to point out what the rules say about mid-air tackles. You'll see that it says that it's illegal to tackle an opposing player attempting to field a kick on the full, which is the important aspect of this, while the player is in mid-air," Annesley said during his footy briefing on Monday.
"That applies specifically to fielding a kick on the full, so just bearing that in mind, this particular incident, of course, wasn't from a kick on the full, it was an attempted field goal. It was then charged down and in the course of that charge down the ball bounces up, Reuben Garrick goes up for the ball and Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad makes contact with him after he fields the ball."
"Obviously after the game, there was a lot of discussion and the discussion was primarily around whether an on-field penalty should have been awarded for this.
"There were comments from the coach who said that he felt this should have been penalised. I took a view [publically] over the course of the weekend because obviously, the debate would have raged across the weekend if we waited until today. I took the view that there shouldn't have been a penalty to come from this incident because of the rule that talks it must be from a kick on the full.
"The reason it's structured that way is that there are other incidents in games where there is contact with players who are in mid-air and what the referees have to determine is whether it's dangerous or not and to what extent the player who committed the contact was at least careless in the way they approached it.
"I took the view that there was no breach of the rule in this case, and therefore whether any action was to flow from this was a subjective matter, which the referee and bunker took a view on and decided that there was no lack of care exerted by Nicoll-Klokstad."
Australian Rugby League Commission chairman Peter V'Landys suggested the rule will be reviewed at the end of the season, but Annesley said if the rule is changed it would need to be done carefully to ensure it doesn't take away from the ability of wingers scoring or defending tries in the corner.
"I think that the chairman [Peter V'Landys] has said it needs to be reviewed at the end of the season, and that's fine, we review rules every season," Annesley said.
"One of the reasons why the rule only applies to kicks on the field is that we have to make sure there are no unintended consequences of rule changes.
"Changes to rules that aren't thought through properly can have other considerations.
"How often do we see tries like this [where a player is in mid-air] in our game these days. There is a player in mid-air who gets tackled. Again, I'm not saying it's the same as what happened, but if we change the rule, we have to change the rule that is not going to inhibit some of these tries we see or punish players who try to stop these tries.
"Players can equally land awkwardly from these sorts of incidents as we saw with Garrick landing awkwardly. Thankfully, he didn't get inverted which would have changed the whole scenario."
I think that is the most sensible thing I have heard about this whole business.
Whatever change is made will have consequences (some anticipated and some not anticipated). If the positive consequences outweigh the negative consequence, the change will be deemed successful. If they don’t, then the change will have been a failure.
GA is correct to say that we (NRL, public, club officials etc) need to think about the change. I hope he publishes the revision and asks for comments, before making his decision.
It was pretty clear cut that Annesley is hiding behind a technicality in the rule…..Nicholl-Klostad shows no regard for Garricks safety and makes no attempt to even look where the ball is..CARELESS,RECKLESS and DANGEROUS…ironically on a night where money was being raised for Daniel Anderson, its only luck were not raising money for Rueben Garrick…in the rules my arse!!!