Consistency, crackdowns and bad decisions: If Round 23 wasn’t a crackdown, what was it?

Before Round 23, there had not been a send off in the NRL since Round 2 this season.

It appeared that the crackdown on sending players off for high shots or other dangerous contact, particularly with the head and neck, had all but evaporated after nine players were sent off between Round 14 and the grand final last year. That is a period of just 93 games.

In total last year, there were 12 send offs, with three of those being for high tackles, and the remainder for either dangerous throws, dangerous contact or dissent. Ultimately, a majority of those send offs (apart from dissent or hip drops) were down to contact with the head and neck, which the NRL have been desperately attempting to stamp out of the game over the last 30 or so months.

The high shot crackdown also saw an enormous multiple of sin bins throughout 2022 - something that has carried on into 2023. It's a crackdown that has been ongoing since Magic Round in 2021, with three players given their marching orders that weekend, and another three over the back-end of that season.

In 2023, Jacob Saifiti found himself sent off in Round 2 by Peter Gough for a high shot, and then, that was it.

For 149 games, no player was sent off. Sin bins since Round 11 have also been reduced, although have picked back up significantly in the last month.

Between Rounds 1 and 11, there were 65 sin bins. Between Round 12 and Round 19, there were only 20, with 18 sin bins then recorded over the last 4 rounds.

But I digress - to go from 12 send offs last season and 9 in a period of 93 games last year, to none in 149 games since Round 2 this year, to suddenly having 2 in 2 games for tackles that weren't deemed to be Grade 3 offences by the NRL's match review committee is scarcely believable at this stage of the season.

The NRL's head of football Graham Annesley attempted to explain on Monday during his weekly footy briefing that it wasn't a crackdown, and instead, the decisions made by the officials involved were "judgement calls."

RELATED: Annesley's full comments confirming no crackdown in Round 23

"The first thing I'd like to address today was suggestions that over the weekend there was some sort of crackdown underway in relation to a range of different things," Annesley said during his weekly briefing at NRL HQ on Monday.

"[Whether it was] infringements by teams on the field, technical infringements, foul play... I just want to re-enforce that nothing could be further from the truth.

"There were no instructions given to match officials leading up to the weekend outside of the ordinary instructions that they get every single week and the coaching that they undertake during the course of the week through their coaching staff, so there was no crackdown.

"What we saw on the weekend was a reflection of the intensity [of the games and competition]. There were a number of games that were extremely close, tight and difficult to referee. There were tight decisions, and some of those decisions of course didn't go the way clubs would hope they would go, and fans hoped they would go.

"There was quite a lot of discussion about the decisions made in those games.

"We saw a number of instances of foul play over the weekend where we had players penalised on the field, placed on report, sent to the sin and of course, we had two players sent off in the NRL and we saw another dismissal in the NRLW, but that was not as a result of any instructions from either head office or from the referees coaching staff. These are judgement calls from the referees that they are called upon to make every single week and every single game."

"But to claim there was no crackdown would be doing a disservice to those "judgement calls."

Either the judgement was so poor that the position of the officials (who are rated as some of the best in the game) on both the field and in the bunker must be questioned for the level of consistency on display, or the NRL are intentionally hiding the presence of new instructions to the officiating group prior to Round 23.

Both of the tackles that were sent off - being Nathan Brown's for the Roosters and Moeaki Fotuaika's for the Gold Coast Titans - were graded as Grade 2 careless high tackles by the match review committee.

Thomas Burgess was then only sin-binned on Saturday for a similar shot with intent, and also charged with a Grade 2 offence the following day.

The fact that the three tackles, and that of Jarome Luai, who escaped on-field punishment and was slapped with a Grade 1 offence, are all viewed differently is alarming to the NRL. Annesley tried to explain that Luai's tackle not being penalised was a result of a lack of force.

“Having spoken to the match review committee, what saved Jarome Luai from going to the bin was the degree of force, which is the main determining factor in these incidents,” Annesley said per The Sydney Morning Herald.

Given Luai was off the ground and made direct contact with intent though, that explanation seems well off the mark.

And that doesn't even mention the tackle of Titans' dummy half Chris Randall in the same game as Fotuaika's send off. Despite making high content, he didn't even face ten minutes in the sin bin. A few minutes later, Warriors' second-rower Marata Niukore was sin-binned for a slap.

What's more alarming though is that Brown and Fotuaika were sent off without a crackdown underway from the NRL, despite the fact three high tackles have been graded as worse this season without send offs.

While Jacob Saifiti's send off was graded as a grade 3 reckless high tackle (essentially a Grade 6 high tackle), the following high shots have not been sent off this season:

• Round 1, Wade Graham, Grade 1 reckless high tackle (essentially Grade 4)
• Round 5, Bailey Simonsson, Grade 3 careless high tackle
• Round 22, Tyrone Peachey, Grade 3 careless high tackle

That list doesn't take into account a Round 2 Grade 3 shoulder charge from Scott Drinkwater, or a number of Grade 3 hip drops which have not been penalised by send offs as they would have been last year.

Again, consistency has gone out the back window. It's a buzzword in the NRL, sure, but an important one at that, and one that is constantly brought up because fans frankly feel insulted that the competition can't work it out in the same game, let alone from game to game and round to round.

The most recent of those high shots - Tyrone Peachey's - was just last weekend.

How can we go from, in the space of the week, that (an ugly tackle in the best case description for the Penrith utility) not being sent off, to two send offs in 24 hours for shots that all season have been sin bins?

But let's for a moment side with Annesley and pretend there were no instructions to crackdown on high shots over the course of the weekend.

It's not as if player behaviour has magically improved this season.

As it stands, there have been 219 match review committee charges either found guilty or with an early guilty plea, resulting in $292,850 in fines, 126 weeks worth of suspensions and 103 sin bins.

That's with four rounds left to play. The running average is 9.52 charges per week, $12,732.61 in fines per week, 5.48 weeks of suspensions per round and 4.48 sin bins per round.

Last year, the total numbers after 25 rounds were 159 charges, $164,075 in fines, 98 weeks of suspensions and 89 sin bins. That spits out averages of 6.36 charges per week, $6563 in fines per week, 3.92 matches of suspensions and 3.56 sin bins per round.

So if every key figure has increased, indicating worse behaviour, why have send offs suddenly disappeared for 149 games, particularly when, as mentioned, there have been some shocking tackles let go throughout the course of the season.

How can that be the case?

The short answer, really, unless the match review committee and refereeing group are on completely different wavelengths throughout the course of the season, is that it can't be the case.

Not without additional instructions on top of the usual anyway.

Either the on-field judgement calls were flat-out wrong, or there is a crackdown underway.

Whether a new precedent has been set or not ahead of the finals remains to be seen.

But I look forward to seeing if the grand final referee has the guts to send a player from the field for a tackle like we saw from Brown or Fotuaika in Round 23.

If it's consistency the NRL want, that is now the only way forward, whether there is a crackdown in place or not.