RogerMoore wrote:
Saints must have had compelling evidence. Had they have lost the appeal and it be deemed frivolous, they would have lost Walmsley for the Wigan fixture. I don't think they would have risked that for a £250 fine. If it was for the incident I think it was, it was a head clash, commented on at the time by the clowns, sorry commentary team, on Sky. It seems at the moment the review panel are leaving themselves open to appeals. The McDonnell ban and appeal shows that they just took the word of the touch judges decision on the field as gospel, It would appear as a result of Leeds appeal, that despite all the video angles, they couldn't find the evidence of that. I presume the touch judge must have back tracked as they allowed the appeal. How many times has this happened and a club hasn't appealed for fear of the appeal being deemed frivolous and losing a player for an extra game with an important fixture at stake.
Saints are very professional with the appeals. It's always based on something. The Knowles incident before the Grand Final for example, they got an independent medical expert to prove that he didn't move the arm beyond the natural range of motion, so therefore it couldn't have been putting an undue risk of injury on the player, which was the rationale used for the grading.
With the Walmsley one, the MRP put 'high tackle, player attempts tackle, but is reckless about the outcome'. What happened was Greenwood runs the ball in hard, his head hits Roby's in a headclash (Who interestingly wasn't cited) and bounced off like a deflected shot in football and hits Walmsley's head. It was a bizarre charge in the first place and another that has happened due to this ridiculous mantra of banning players if an injury occurs. They've presumably charged Walmsley and not Roby as they think the injury came from his head hitting Walmsley's. If you pause it when the initial contact occurs, Walmsley's head is nowhere near Greenwood's, so how can it be reckless? It's just unfortunate.
McDonnell is either really lucky, in that the video doesn't pick up a punch that happened, or really unlucky in that the touch judge sees a motion and interprets that as a punch when it in fact wasn't. Again, the panel have used the injury to Lomax as part of the rationale for the charge along with the testimony of the touch judge. Once Leeds proved he already had a mark on his face before it, they reversed the ban. Again, strange as Lomax's shirt was clean before it, and looked like Terry Butcher after it. In reality the MRP should never have charged him, if they can see there was no punch, or back the touch judge and ban him anyway despite the lack of video proof. Sending off sufficient and no record on his disciplinary rap sheet would have been the correct outcome for me. That way you're not dismissing the touch judge's opinion.
The MRP are just going too far in re-refereeing games for me. They're looking for reasons to ban players. We need to move to a system similar to football's, in that they trust the officials and don't re-referee the entire game frame by frame looking for any hint of a possible foul or injury. They way they do it now is also biased against the teams who are televised. There are far more charges brought from the televised games vs the non-televised games as there is better footage and more camera angles. That can't be right.
