Recap the latest round of NRL action with the Repeat Set: Talking points, highlights, lowlights and the Play of the Round.
Here’s your Repeat Set for Round 10 of the 2021 NRL season:
- Cranky at the crackdown
- Somebody sign Nicho Hynes
- A round to remember for…Ben Murdoch-Masila
- A round to forget for..Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs
- Play of the Round: Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles
- Player Appreciation Post: Marty Taupau
Cranky at the crackdown
The NRL sent out an email at 12:57 pm on Friday confirming a crackdown on head knocks that they had intended on performing a week earlier. By 10 pm that night, eight players had been sent to the sin-bin.
By Sunday morning, Peter V’Landys was blaming the referees for being “overconscientious in the enforcement” of an edict he gave them one afternoon to prepare for ahead of one of the biggest weekends of the NRL season.
Once again, the process followed to make changes to the game is far worse than the change itself.
North Queensland Cowboys coach Todd Payten nailed it in his post-match press conference on Saturday night:
“I feel sorry for the players. As a game we’ve tried to speed it up, but now we’re penalising players in a fast game under fatigue that find themselves in vulnerable positions. I feel sorry for the referees because they’re the ones under pressure that have to make those calls.
“I really feel sorry for our supporters. This is the biggest weekend on our calendar for the season, everyone is spending hard-earned money to turn up and we’re taking away from the game of rugby league.”
Rules have changed with little consultation or trial. Unsurprisingly, the 26 players and official in the middle of every match are struggling to keep up and fans are becoming fed up. Social media caught fire with eulogies to rugby league following its apparent death in Round 10. While taking it to that extreme is obviously all carried out in jest and most of those fans will be back on the couch with the footy on for Round 11, the sincere “tackle lower” responses were just as far off the mark.
Clint Newton added some perspective to the idea that simply tackling lower isn’t what players and coaches disagree with:
“We will always support the game introducing or enforcing policy that prioritises player health and safety. Reducing the probability and incident rate of contact with the head and neck is necessary, but the success of any change will always hinge on the level of engagement with the major stakeholders and those at the coal face — players, coaches, clubs and states.”
Nobody will argue that improving the way the game rules on high tackles needs improvement – a crackdown like this is long overdue. Especially now under the new rules promoting fatigue, and with it, lazy defensive efforts resulting in more high tackles. But consultation with the major stakeholders – you know, basic business practice – could have avoided what was a disastrous weekend for the NRL.
Speak to coaches and players about how it is all going to look before the fact and we wouldn’t have needed eight sin bins on Friday night to reset what is and isn’t a send off or sin bin. By which time, the lack of process in enforcing new rules and interpretations had been exposed to the masses and this much-needed crackdown started off on the backfoot.
V’Landys has forced the NRL into a corner with his lack of planning. They can hardly backtrack on a change introduced to improve player safety…Instead, they’re going to spend the next month slowly finding a balance and adding even more inconsistency to what constitutes a send off, sin bin or penalty. We won’t get through Cowboys v Knights on Thursday night without “that was a sin bin last week” popping up.
Consistency in these rulings is impossible to achieve, but Round 10 proved that there is a middle ground between the “overconscientious” crackdown and the lack of action we’ve seen in recent years. The arguments for all three send offs over the weekend are strong. Many of the sin bins, not so much. There doesn’t need to be a continued overreaction, just crack down hard on the incidents that need it and back the referees to make those decisions.
That middle ground could have been captured without the controversy and certainly didn’t need to stain the biggest regular-season round of the year. Instead, a lack of effective communication and collaboration resulted in a weekend of negative attention, exposing the reactionary nature of this administration.
MORE: Graham Annesley’s Weekly Football Briefing
Somebody sign Nicho Hynes
For all of the silly chatter recently about the Storm being able to sign Xavier Coates from the wooden spoon-holding Broncos and it apparently highlighting issues with the salary cap (all while ignoring the fact the Storm are signing Coates to fill Josh Addo-Carr’s spot as he heads to the likely 2021 wooden spooners), Nicho Hynes being allowed to sign a one-year deal with Melbourne for this season exposes the truth.
Some club front offices aren’t very good at their job.
After dismantling the St. George-Illawarra Dragons in Round 10 with two try assists, two line breaks, three tackle breaks and 225 running metres, Hynes is a player in demand. Craig Bellamy wants to retain Hynes (that in itself should be a sign for everybody else) but knows there will be “a fair bit of interest in him.”
The signs for other interested clubs have been there for a long time.
First of all, Hynes was allowed to play 63 games at Queensland Cup level between 2017 and 2019. He finished the 2019 season with six tries and an outrageous 21 try assists while running for 116 running metres per game. Hynes then played 11 games in 2020, showing touches of class across multiple positions while displaying his capabilities as a genuine first grader. However, 15 other clubs didn’t take the chance to sign Hynes on a cheap deal on the guise of opportunity while he sat behind Ryan Papenhuyzen and Cameron Munster in the pecking order at the Storm.
It looks like Sunday’s effort is the highlights package Hynes needed to finally get himself out there.
He isn’t credited with the try assist here, but Hynes identifying a miscommunication between Matt Dufty and Josh McGuire allowed Dean Ieremia to go over the line untouched. McGuire peels off the tackle and loads up on the open side which results in the three-on-four overlap. Tyson Smoothy does a good job to engage the marker before Hynes heads straight at the A defender, makes a read on the B and C defenders, and throws the right ball to Justin Olam who shovels it onto Ieremia in the corner.
Hynes later uses some nice footwork to hold up a sliding McGuire before dropping Felise Kaufusi off into half a gap. Some razzle dazzle Storm football soon ends with Jahrome Hughes over the line, but it’s all created by Hynes’ initial break further up the field.
Whether it be at fullback or five-eighth, Hynes’ future is as a ball-player. Playing at the line is a key feature of all the best ball-players in the NRL and Hynes fits the bill. Simply being prepared to take a shot and play late here is what creates the space out wide to allow Olam to do Olam things on his way to the line.
We’ve not seen it too often throughout this time in first-grade, but Hynes showed promising signs of a handy kicking game towards the end of the game on Sunday.
He then plugs himself down the short side, uses Kaufusi to hold up the defence on his inside shoulder before skipping to the outside of Tariq Sims. Once again, his footwork opens up the hole underneath and the Storm go close.
There will be some out there that instantly ignore Hynes’ impressive performance as it came against 12 men. However, it doesn’t excuse the fact that he has managed to fly under the radar for so long as a legitimate first-grader.
Hynes’ rise is the perfect example of how good clubs make the right signings at the right time regardless of salary caps and location. Struggling clubs have had every opportunity to pinch Hynes but failed to identify him and accurately project his future. They’ll now pay more than they would have needed to when he was off-contract 12 months ago.
He is all but certain to leave the Storm at the end of 2021. The only thing more certain than Hynes leaving is the fact the Storm will soon blood a replacement.
A round to remember for…
I hope Nathan Brown remembers the impact Ben Murdoch-Masila had in the middle of the field on Sunday.
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