Hull FC head coach Tony Smith believes Super League’s players were punished too severely by the Match Review Panel this week and has delivered a passionate response after the competition’s controversial opening round. In total, 13 cards were handed out across six fixtures, nine yellow and four red, with 16 charges received upon review.
Nine of those charges led to bans, and three more were referred to tribunals. While Smith witnessed the suspension of three of his Hull FC players, he remains focused on the overall problem with the game and expressed his dismay at the severity of the penalties imposed on players, who are required to change tackle techniques that have been in use for almost 20 years in a single off-season.
Smith is demanding for some overall perspective as the Super League cracks down on head-high contacts with both cards and harsh suspensions, declaring that all coaches and teams are in favour of making the game safer. He thinks that clubs would quickly deploy reserve-grade teams at the current volume, and he has provided a list of more effective ways to convey the message. Speaking at the pre-match press conference for Hull FC, the worry was evident.
Within our sport, we’re evolving,” Smith remarked. “Everyone is aware that we must alter our tackling techniques and approaches; our sport and our insurance both expect it. For our game to be safer, certain things must alter. There, I believe we’re all in accord. It’s just the most sensible approach to do that while causing the least amount of interruption to a sport we love and are proud of. We must maintain it that way. We recognise that we won’t have everything figured out right away, and that is accepted.
I believe that our sport is anxious about how fast we can achieve that through cards and sanctions. Send-offs and sin-bins have the power to alter the result of games, especially in rugby league. We’re concerned because they shouldn’t be taken lightly, and adding more matches on top of that makes no sense. We fear that reserve-grade teams will play one another, meaning that our great players will all be serving suspensions while watching from the stands.
While we’re making every effort to change some of the procedures, how harshly do we want to punish our players? We must assess our progress towards it. To put some of this in context, even if we’re discussing changing our approaches, some of these young men have been approaching the same problems for their entire careers. We’re anxious because it’s difficult to ask them to change so soon and to make it happen so quickly.
The intensity of the alterations is something we are aware of. The phrase, in my opinion, is to avoid going from 0 to 100 too soon. Without losing half of our rivals and our best players, we must implement the proper strategies and tactics to avoid having teams and clubs’ seasons reversed. We don’t need to get to that point, and it shouldn’t have to. I believe that there should be some serious, adult conversations and debates over the harshness of the penalties. That is the main worry.
“I don’t think many would disagree that appropriate levels of punishment should be used. That’s really what matters: the appropriateness of the penalty, not whether it should be meted out or not. I’m not sure, but they’ll tell you about the data indicating that suspension causes the largest change in behaviour. The largest shift, in my opinion, has been how coaches affect their players’ performance and game results. It’s how behaviour modification happens.
We want our players to be on the field for eighty minutes, even though some scientists may have done some obscure research to support the need for player suspensions. We know that during that time, you can give up two or three tries and games can conclude abruptly. Send-offs are given, and this isn’t a reaction to what happened to us the other day—our first was self-inflicted, and that’s enough to alter the course of a game—just one, and we’d already received a sin bin for a high tackle, which was almost sufficient, and now we’re going to receive a third one, but that’s not the point.
It’s about how we’re going to improve as a team and keep our top players on the pitch while also making the effort to lower the number of player head injuries. We’re all in this together because safeguarding kids is what it’s all about. All of us agree, with the exception of how harsh we will get with this too fast. It’s important to approach it sensibly. We should eventually reach a place where we are acting appropriately.
