League Express editor MARTYN SADLER casts his eye over the current Rugby League scene
The Burrow takeover
What a great job Leeds Rhinos and Sky Sports did at Headingley on Friday night!
And by that, I’m not referring to the Rhinos’ 54-0 humiliation of Huddersfield Giants.
I’m referring, of course, to the Burrow family takeover of the event in the build-up to the game.
It was both uplifting and funny and Sky’s Brian Carney and Barrie McDermott played their full part in it, with Macy and Maya comically putting a gag over Brian’s mouth at the start of the show, before pouring a couple of buckets of grass cuttings over Barrie and then interviewing the two coaches, Rohan Smith and Ian Watson, before the game.
The Leeds crowd were fully on board with the whole thing and it was great to hear them chanting “There’s only one Rob Burrow” every time his face appeared on the screen.
The one part of Rob’s body that he still seems able to control is his face and it was wonderful to see him smiling in acknowledgement both of his own remarkable children’s role on the night and at the crowd’s reaction to him.
His extraordinary courage and resilience are truly off the scale.
He surely deserves to be knighted alongside his great friend Kevin Sinfield.
In the meantime, and bearing in mind that Sky Sports is owned by an American company called Comcast, I hope that someone will send the footage of Friday’s night’s pre-game presentation to the company executives in Philadelphia, the city that houses its head office.
I think the love and affection for Rob and his family, together with the presentation made by Sky, should be brought to their attention.
What now for Ian Watson?
Ian Watson looked absolutely forlorn after Friday night’s match.
And who can blame him?
My colleague Garry Schofield, in his column in this issue, suggests that the Giants’ performance on Friday night was the worst performance by any team he had ever seen in Super League.
I am sure there are plenty of contenders for that particular title if we go back over the last 27 years.
But there is one question that has to be asked.
What has gone wrong at Huddersfield Giants?
After such an insipid performance, can anything be rescued from this season?
The tragedy for the club is that just over a year ago the Giants were playing in the Challenge Cup Final at Tottenham and they came so near to winning the Cup against Wigan. The expectation was that they would kick on this season, although the warning signs were perhaps there when they were hammered 28-0 at home by Salford in the opening weekend of last season’s play-offs.
The club lost two key players from last season’s Challenge Cup Final team in Ricky Leutele and Danny Levi and perhaps no one realised just how serious those departures would be for the club.
To some extent, all new signings are a gamble.
And so far, the signing of Jake Connor seems to be a gamble that hasn’t paid off.
On Friday he played for the Giants’ reserve team that defeated Leeds reserves 30-0.
That Giants team contained Sam Halsall, Esan Marsters, Matty English and Harvey Livett, none of whom would probably be too delighted to find themselves playing reserve team football.
As far as Huddersfield are concerned, I’m an outsider, but it looks to me as though the club effectively needs to start its season again.
Someone needs to make a statement about why it all went so wrong at Headingley if the club is to retain any credibility with its supporters.
Penalty tries should be abolished
Every so often I find certain of the laws of the game quite absurd.
Currently, my target is the rule about penalty tries.
Last week, in the Challenge Cup tie between Wigan and Warrington, Matt Dufty appeared to score a try for the Wolves at a crucial point of the game.
Dufty’s ball-carrying arm hit the floor just in front of the try line and he couldn’t resist reaching out to score, as he saw it.
Under the laws of the game as they stand, the decision to disallow the try and award a penalty to Wigan was the correct one.
And yet why do we do this?
If a player can reach out to score a try before the referee has called held, why don’t we allow this to happen?
And why should the sanction for trying to do this be a penalty to the other side?
It seems to me to be a very harsh punishment for a player doing something that is instinctive.
Surely the more appropriate reaction would be to make the player play the ball from where his ball-carrying arm hit the floor.
This article is taken from Martyn Sadler’s ‘Talking Rugby League’ column in this week’s issue of League Express. To subscribe, go to https://www.totalrl.com/league-express/