It was rotten to see Ray Thompson holding his broken jaw together as he left the field on Saturday night. While the North Queensland Cowboys beat the Newcastle Knights 26-6, all thoughts were with Thompson after suffering the shocking injury that will most likely see him miss the rest of the season.
Newcastle Knights forward Kade Snowden was sent off for the incident and will take no further part in the NRL season or the finals series. It was a harsh decision by the referee’s but one you can understand. They had a player on the ground holding his face together and the video referee telling them there was head contact with a braced shoulder. In that situation, your chances of staying on the field a very, very low.
I don’t think Kade Snowden’s hit was a shoulder charge. I don’t think there was much he could have done to avoid the contact that was made. At the end of the day I think this is just one of those accidents that happen when you get very big humans running towards each other.
Accidents are going to happen in Rugby League, especially at the highest level where the game is so fast and the players are all so big. Rugby League is a collision sport. It is a sport where players players generally line up 10 meters apart and run at one another carrying a ball. The law of averages dictates that eventually someone will slip over, step funny, fall at the wrong time, time something wrong….and someone will get hurt as a result.
It wasnt as though Kade Snowden ran out of the defensive line and drove his shoulder into Thompson. He moved up in defense and when Thompson passed the ball Snowden braced for an unavoidable collision. If you watch the vision of the tackle you can see that Snowden is looking to where the ball has been passed to, he isn’t looking at Thompson at the point of impact.
Snowden doesn’t have the ability to disappear. There was pretty much nothing he could do in the split second before impact that he could have done to avoid contact. Does that make it unfair that he will miss so many weeks for an accident? I think it does.
Snowden has been charged by the NRL Judiciary as though he went into a tackle recklessly. That just wasn’t that case.
Obviously we want to try and make the game as safe as possible. It is brutal enough without players having to worry about being taken out by foul play. There is a line though, a very clear line between foul play and s simple accident.
Kade Snowden will not play another game this year before of an accident. By banning him for so many weeks, what does the game achieve?
But that’s now what Rothfield said…