The Virtual Terrace • Re: Ball stealing

Our game is littered with this sort of thing.

It’s not just ball steals (and correctly mentioned earlier, players releasing the ball the make it look like it’s been stolen), but it’s all the dark arts: time wasting, moaning at officials, trapping in, pretending to be trapped in, diving, more moaning, feigning injury, moving off the mark, swearing at officials, holding up until “held” is called then taking them to ground after “held”, lying on, hands on the ball, more swearing, getting all shirty about something core to the sport like a tough but fair tackle (some players are such mardarses these days!), more moaning, not forming the scrum properly, no playing the ball properly, more moaning and swearing, cheering opposition knock-ons (bloody pathetic that sort of thing) etc.

For me it’s not the quality of players that separates the NRL from Super League the most. It’s that they don’t have anywhere near the level of petty play that we do that’s the biggest gap between the leagues.

The ruck in our game is an absolute mess!

Which is a shame because when we do actually play rugby, I think our game is more expansive/less robotic than the NRL