In the case of the hand-on-the-ball drops, your description of the way the refs are officiating it is spot on. However in terms of the frequency of them, I’m sure it looks a lot more prevalent when they replay the incident 4 times over.PigRickman wrote: ↑August 15, 2019, 8:37 am As an aside to this, do we even know how many of the strips this year have been the drop off strips?
I would guess, and it would just be a guess, that of the 70-80 strips this year, less than 15 of them would be those ones. The vast majority are just clean, straight up one on ones.
Do you watch games? How many times a game do you see a guy just loose possession of the footy because there is a hand around the football. The code had spent 2 decades devaluing ball security, where basically before this rule change, if you drop the ball and there is even a hand near the footy, regardless of whether someone was playing at it, it was a penalty. They've been bailing out poor ball security as a rule since the turn of the century.yeh raiders wrote: ↑August 14, 2019, 10:45 pm What ? Like there’s a ball control epidemic going on! Christ !
And it still happens a bit this year, but been curtailed considerable. The referees are happy to call "loose carry" now.
Ball security matters, it's one of the first things they teach you as a young guy.
If a player has the football, and wants to retain possession, there is no reason why they cant, whether there is 1 person in the tackle or 50. The ball is only so big and it can really only be contested by one other player. So it's ball carrier vs one defender, and the ball carrier has the advantage of possession. If you lose the footy in the circumstance, well that's on you.
I don’t think they’ve devalued ball security across the board, you only have to look at the number of clear knock-backs, which is are called knock-ons to see that.
Nor do I think it’s as straight forward and easy to keep hold of the ball, with the way in which defenders are gang tackling and wrestling the ball free this season.
In an era where wrestling techniques and ruck manipulation have become so important and defence is so strongly drilled, I’m happy to support offloads and quick POTB over the new stripping rule.
I’ll leave it there, let’s see how it pans out for the rest of the season.