The Manly Sea Eagles and St George Illawarra Dragons clashed on Sunday afternoon, and the NRL has revealed that one call went incorrect.
The Sea Eagles pulled off a valiant victory at home, despite having to play with just 13 players for a significant portion of the second half. It has now been determined that second-rower Haumole Olakau’atu’s first-half try was the result of an obstruction.
NRL head of football Graham Annesley revealed on Monday afternoon at his monthly footy briefing that Ben Trbojevic was blocking Kyle Flanagan, calling it a try at the time by the NRL bunker.
Annesley stated, “You can see Ben Trbojevic running through there, and the bunker reviewed this.”
“If you take a closer look, you can see that Ben is going through, that the ball crosses his back, and that Ben and Kyle Flanagan are now in contact.
“Haumole then reappears through the opening Ben made. At this moment, it’s evident that Kyle Flanagan needs to shift around since Ben is in the way of the ball carrier. In the end, he manages to reach Haumole, but not well enough to stop the try from being scored.
Ben has not only stopped in the queue, but he has also made contact with Flanagan’s outside shoulder. Although he couldn’t have stopped Kyle from arriving, there is undoubtedly an effect on how he did so and whether he could have been in a better position to stop that try from being scored.
We are the first to confess that there are occasions when bunker judgements regarding obstruction are contentious. They frequently cause disagreements. Overall, we examined it this morning. Granted, we had much more time than the bunker to do so, but that doesn’t change the fact that, in our opinion, based on how we have decided on similar issues in the past, this attempt should have been overturned and not upheld.
But two more contentious choices, both made by Dragons, turned out to be right.
One of those was an aerial effort by Zac Lomax. Though he appeared to drag the ball backwards, the bunker decided he had knocked it on into a Manly defender as he leaped for a kick.
That’s not how the NRL interpreted the situation.
“This try was referred to check the grounding, but in this particular case, you’ll hear the bunker review an incident before the grounding and they make a decision based on that,” Annesley explained.
By our regulations, the bunker assessing these instances is permitted to examine every facet of this specific play. They have access to everything, even though the ruling was referred for grounding.
“The crucial moment is when the ball begins to descend, it is evident that it touches Lomax’s fingertips, strikes an opponent, and then returns to Lomax—that is a knock-on. The bunker doesn’t need to examine the grounding any more at this stage. The bunker made a judgement based on the automatic negation of try prospects.”
There was debate over a possible knock-on during another Lomax try that was awarded, but Annesley insisted there was no separation with the ball throughout the play.
“The important part of this decision is of course the grounding after they cleared everything else. Remember this try was awarded on the field, and if you go through frame by frame, you can see he has his hand wrapped around the ball and lower arm on top of the ball,” Annesley said.
“There was a suggestion by some that the ball comes away before he grounds it, but the bunker I think correctly says they can’t see any evidence of separation there. The arm is on top of the ball as he hits the ground, so as long as the hand comes away from the ball, there is absolutely no reason to overturn this decision.
“The important thing that the bunker says is that based on the on-field decision, there is insufficient evidence to overturn the on-field decision.”
