The Man of Feathers Peter V’landys has announced a brand-new rule to address the spate of head-related sin bins during Magic Round.
From round 11, a player won’t be sin binned if they make accidental contact with an opponent’s head in a tackle. Instead, the opposition kicker will have a penalty goal shot directly in front 10 metres out.
Send offs for deliberate or dangerous head shots remain though, with the penalty goal still taken.
“This rule adjustment will allow the NRL to keep its hardline stance on head shots, but limit the chaos that we’ve seen so far,” said V’landys. “We could’ve made it an automatic two points, but we wanted to add a bit of drama for the fans. Ninety-nine percent of kickers should throw it over, but that one percent that misses it will go viral in five seconds and fuel a 1,000 Fox League clickbait articles.”
In preparation, all the NRL’s goalkickers (both frontline and back-up) will spend an extra 30 minutes at training practicing penalty shots from 10 metres out, just to make sure.
The Man of Feathers has shot down some social media hand-wringing that The Greatest Game of All will turn into a rugby union-style penalty goal-a-thon. “I understand their concern; rugby goalkicking duels are a great cure for insomnia, but penalising teams on the scoreboard is the best punishment. They’ll get the message quickly and the ‘armchair experts’ can stop whinging.”
