The knotty issue of obstruction seems to be raising it's ugly head in the NRL again in the last few weeks. But is a few disallowed tries reason enough to stop using dummy runners?
Seems to me that in most (not all cases), tries are disallowed when dummy runners either stop in the defensive line, or, worse, run into defenders. This gives refs an easy option to disallow, even if the defender inconvenienced was in reality, 'never going to get there'. If dummy runners made sure they ran through gaps, not into defenders, they'd have much more chance. Of course, this doesn't overcome the issue of defenders themselves deliberately colliding with dummy runners to get tries disallowed (hi, Joel Tomkins
), but if the dummy runners were whiter than white, it might make matters a lot clearer.