The interpretation at the moment is pretty clear. If you have the ball in your possession and you come around the back of one of your own players, it's obstruction whether a tackler is impeded or not.



It's farcical, but it is what it is and was perfectly applied in relation to Sutcliffe's no try last night.



The problem is that it isn't the interpretation we necessarily started the season with, which gave referees and VRs a lot more freedom to decide whether a defender had been obstructed or not.



In some ways, the players have brought this on themselves with their constant appealing after every try scored with a dummy runner involved. Shenton in the Leeds game for example, who complained after at least two of Leeds tries that he had been obstructed when he hadn't.



Everyone now knows what the interpretation is. It needs players to be smart enough to adapt to it.

It's a joke. Sides get away with most of these "obstructions" unless they're unfortunate enough to score.

It would seem to be that simple but the rules judgements to be evolving as the season is progressing.



I would say that the interpretation on-field doesn't take into account how far away the player is that you run behind. In the case of Sutcliffe's try Bailey was yards away from him completely out of play. I strongly suspect that if the Suttcliffe try had gone to the VR he would have awarded the try. The VR's seem to be actually looking for obstruction or sticking riggidly to the rule that passing behind a player in motion is okay, running past him and passing is not. But in most of those cases the player "obstructing" is a dummy runner in the attacking line and does get in the way to some degree.

As for Shenton's complaints - both were looked at and rightly declined by the video ref.



It's a shame, because I was impressed early season by the reasonable quality of the refereeing and the relatively low penalty counts. Now the men in the middle have a new toy to play with and they are blowing the pea out of their whistles.

Sorry if this has been covered already as I've not read the full thread, but if the obstruction problem that is plaguing our game at the moment is so 'simple to resolve' why is EVERY team getting pinged for it week after week?



Why hasn't EVERY coach managed to coach it out of their respective teams?



I think the problem is far, far deeper than your limited knowledge makes out.

This phrase 'pinged' needs getting rid of, along with 'stanza', 'for mine' and many others.

Probably not in their interests to. Unless a try is scored and a video ref happens to be present, the use of dummy runners remains a potent weapon. And even then, the odd try gets awarded under circumstances very similar to ones where a score was disallowed, often in the same game.

14 years as a graded referee - yup limited knowledge

The only thing that is annoying me with it at the moment is the amount of video ref time spent scrutinising whether, for instance, a player is just very precisely exactly behind a dummy runner when he catches the ball, or that all important 6 inches past the dummy runner (who is 10 yards in front and not really influencing play).



The reason it annoys me is that it has started to feel like we're trying not to give tries, and getting overly pedantic.



And if I think it's too pedantic, something's going wrong.

It's got to the stage where I'd like to see the on-field ref and linesmen deal with obstruction calls, so they make a sure judgement whether the player was impeded. While we're at it the ref and linesman should be able to judge on knock-ons too. Often the video ref comes up with either the wrong decision on a decision of millimetres where the 'scoring' team would have been better off getting tackled on the line and going over next play.



So leave the field of play to the referee and let the video-ref judge on grounding and foot-in-touch, both of which benefit from clear video evidence.



TV matches would instantly be 10 minutes shorter.

Spot on...they are actively looking for technical obstructions rather than (as in the past) first seeing if any player was really obstructed.



Its worth bearing in mind the actual rule in guestion... 15(j) ”deliberately obstructs an opponent who is not in possession” a split second technical overlap such as catching the ball half a stride before fully passing the player in front (as the VR was repeatedly checking on the given Cas try on Saturday) really can't be a deliberate obstruction

... and how many years have you been coaching full time professional RL players?

The way to stop being penalised for this seems quite straight forward to me.

When a dummy runner goes into the defensive line keep going forward beyond the defensive players and then they can't obstruct anyone (unless contact is made on the way through).

What seems to happen is that when the ball carrier goes beyond the dummy runner the dummy runner just stops and that is usually at the defensive line.

The Sutcliffe one was even worse than this, Bailey had gone through the line and then turned around and walked back into the defensive line. If Bailey had just stopped (or continued to go forward) and not walked back towards his own players it wouldn't have been an obstruction.