Wigg'n wrote:
Suggesting Lockers attacks players on the ground is a new one though.
Every chance he gets he'll put a forearm into a grounded players face. He's a hard, tough and uncompromising player who makes sure you know it when he tackles you. In his early days he made many dentists very wealthy.
I have no real problem with the aggresive tactics Wigan use, I started watching the game in the early eighties where physically intimidating the opposition was as fundamental as passing and running. The problem is that referees are ill equiped these days to deal with it. They don't sort it out themselves and they don't allow other teams to sort it out properly. There are some players in your team who if playing in another era would simply have been knocked out on the pitch with little or no consequence. Widnes played the intimidation card to it's ultimate and other teams dealt with it. I saw Roy Dickinson lay out Les Gorley, who was stretchered off the pitch, and all the ref did was wave a finger at Roy. There was nobody more worthy of being knocked out than Les Gorley and the ref knew that. The sight of Paul Cullen being chased around Wilderspool by an enraged Eric Grothe still makes me smile.
Refs are trying to keep a game going, they know Wigan are using these tactics but can't penalise everything and RL is still a physical game, but it's only one half of the coin. If you allow these tactics to go unpunished then you should allow the appropriate response to go unpunished also. But that doesn't happen.
