‘Referees can’t invent head contact’: Graham Annesley shuts down suggestions of a pre-finals crackdown on high contact

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‘Referees can’t invent head contact’: Graham Annesley shuts down suggestions of a pre-finals crackdown on high contact

NRL head of football Graham Annesley has refuted claims head office has called for a crackdown on high contact before the finals and says it’s not up to referees to play the role of doctors to assess if players are injured or not.

Sharks coach Craig Fitzgibbon brought up the issue on Saturday night after Kayal Iro was sent to the sin bin for a high shot on Dallin Watene-Zelezniak who stayed down for a few moments but avoided having to leave the field for an HIA.

The NRL is in the process of checking all head knocks from the weekend, with no suggestion the Warriors did anything wrong as the winger grabbed a hat-trick in their epic late win at Shark Park.

“We’ve got to protect the players because we don’t want to see high shots. I get it, we want it out of the game,” Fitzgibbon said.

“But to wait until a couple of weeks before the semis to start doing a crackdown, that ******* was a disaster. It was stop-start, stop-start, stop-start, and then gamesmanship starts to come into it.

“How bad are they? Are they hurt? Will they stay down? We all know what we’re doing there, but we wait until this part of the season to start really cracking down on it.

“We’re stopping and starting game after game after game. We want to see good footy in the semis. This is the time of the year we should be cheering and letting the game flow.

“I’m all for the protection of players, but there’s a balance with how bad they are and the significance.”

Annesley revealed there had been a season-high 30 penalties for high shots in round 25 but stressed it had nothing to do with any perceived directives from head office.

“I don’t know why we’ve seen that spike in high tackles, but we have seen a spike, there’s no question about that,” he said.

“That’s not because of any sort of crackdown. Referees can’t invent head contact.

“It either takes place or it doesn’t, and they just have to respond to it.”

Annesley explained why Iro was sent to the sin for a tackle that ordinarily would have only resulted in a penalty, and defended the referee for not giving a warning to the Sharks given they don’t have to during the run of play.

“It’s very clear that the action was taken by the referee on the basis of continuous indiscretions over a short ******* of time,” he said.

“I believe there were four penalties for misconduct over a six-minute *******. In this particular incident, there was high contact, but it wasn’t high contact that got him sent to the sin bin.

“In normal circumstances, that might have resulted in a penalty. In this particular case, it was the series of events that took place relatively quickly over a short ******* of time all for foul play.

“It was clear that it was the referee that made this decision (not the Bunker).”

He also stressed it’s not up to officials to decide if players are injured or not when determining what sort of punishment they should hand out.

“You can just imagine the furore if a referee said to a player ‘get up, you’re not hurt’ and it turns out that he’s got some sort of serious injury,” he said.

“These are matters that are in the hands of coaches about whether players stay down to try to get penalties or not.

“The referees can only act on what they see. There has certainly been no directive given to the referees about going ******* on any of this stuff at this point of the season.

“We’re just trying to get consistency as everyone calls for by making sure they’re applying an equal standard every week.”

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