Andy P said:
Have watched a bit of league on tele recently and wanted to understand what constitutes a high tackle? Reason for asking is that there appears to be long passages of play were players just crash into each other and any hope of an off load is killed off by a smother tackle around shoulder/head height.
There appears to be little incentive to keep the ball alive as a result.
Keeping the ball alive with an offload is absolutely deadly in our code.
Deadly.
See, while players are trying to tackle someone, the defenders are all starting to retreat to make it easier for them to be 10m when the ball is next played, and if the ballcarrier suddenly manages to get an arm free and offload, the player who takes the offload is now in ~10m of space
and the defenders are all disorganised and going the wrong way.
This is why the first man in is coached to go high and lock the ball up, with supporting tacklers then taking the ballcarrier to ground - 3m of territory is usually worth giving up to be sure you can lock the ball up and have a decent chance of putting the ballcarrier down on his back so he can't play it quickly.
Now, from the attackers' point of view, the 10m law and no contest for possession after the tackle has been effected means that it's possible to gain some risk-free ground (although not to win the match unless the other team's forwards literally cannot tackle) with one pass to a fat bloke who then takes the ball into contact, looking to drive the defenders backwards and get a quick play-the-ball. If you hang onto the ball, it then can't be taken off you until after you've played it - if you offload early in the tackle count and it gets dropped, then you've just given up 2/3 chances to get that much more free field position and you've lost possession, which is far harder to get back when the ball isn't being constantly competed for - so it doesn't necessarily pay to be looking for the offload all the time, it has to be tactically worth the risk
and you have to be physically able to offload the ball in the face of opponents who are desperately trying to stop you from doing just that.
I also thought the commentators were a step up from the ****wits we normally get doing commentary on the Union games.
Eddie and Stevo are reasonably up to speed with the laws (and not the laws as they were 20 years ago, either), and they're also not afraid to say "that was a good decision" when the referee makes a good decision, and if they think the referee's had a good (or extremely good) game after ~70 minutes, they're not afraid to say so. They get a few things wrong but they're commentators - and because they've got half a clue, it makes them much more credible when they do have a go at a referee, because any semi-regular watcher knows that they're quite prepared to praise a good performance when they see one.
Last week, in the 70th minute, all four commentators and analysts spent ~45 seconds of downtime analysing a recent knock-on decision and concluded that it was probably a very poor one, and they all agreed on it. A couple of minutes later, after play had resumed...
"Ben Thaler's had an excellent game tonight, hasn't he?"
"You're not wrong there, he's really let the game flow but he hasn't been afraid to penalise when necessary."
And then they moved on. Can you imagine Stuart Barnes seeing a decision that was so obviously wrong that he felt the need to complain about it for nearly a minute, and then shortly afterwards being prepared to put that aside and say that the referee had had an excellent game? A lot of people within our code complain about Eddie and Stevo, but for me it can only be a case of other people's grass always being greener.
This is a statistic that I have challenged in the past. It does not count the ball as being out of play between a tackle and open play via a play the ball. That may only take a couple of seconds, but with 400 tackles per game it amounts to 15 minutes or more.
It is argued that the ball is not actually dead (you can knock on, for example) but there are so few options and so many restrictions that it is nothing like open play.
The defenders are working to get onside; the tacklers are working to, ahem, control the tackle to their advantage and then to get square at marker; the tackled player is working to get free and play the ball; his team-mates are working to get in position for the next phase. It's not like everyone's standing around waiting for something to happen; and if they are, the referee's probably about to ping someone for holding down.
