While I was sleeping off my Napa-headbutt-induced apoplexy (again), the Catalans Dragons, from Perpignan in the south of France, won the Challenge Cup at Wembley. They became the first non-English team to do so since the competition’s inception in 1896. It’s an amazing milestone in the game’s reconstruction in France and the slow globlisation of… Read More NRL Recap – Round 24, 2018

News came through yesterday that the All-Stars game is going to change from an Indigenous against the World format to an Indigenous Australia vs Maori NZ game. All I can say in response is, “Finally.” It makes a decision over who to support much more straightforward, allowing for some emotional investment in the game that’s… Read More NRL Recap – Round 23, 2018

I suppose if I was going to write an op-ed to open this week’s post, it should be about Cleary’s non-defection to the Panthers and what’s going to happen to Bennett at Red Hill. If I am honest, coach movements are about as interesting to me as bowel movements (or you could read Mascord’s much… Read More NRL Recap – Round 22, 2018

The battle for the soul of rugby league continues, as the vested interests, and their patsies in the media, continue to fling poop at the refs and the organisation and the game like a bunch of bored monkeys. Which is basically what it comes down to: the rich and powerful (at least by rugby league… Read More NRL Recap – Round 21, 2018

We’ve been talked at a lot about refereeing shockers but the media have been having some serious howlers of late. Here’s a selection of some recent headlines from Fox League: ‘Courting disaster’: Experts unload on Widdop’s new hairdo ‘Get rid of touch judges’: Elias’ big call after refereeing shocker It has been described as one of… Read More NRL Recap – Round 20, 2018

I think Donald Horne said, “Rugby league is a dumb game, run by people who share its dumbness.” * Let’s remember that refereeing is really hard. Running ten kilometres of sprints is hard. Officiating a rugby league game is hard. Trying to do both at the same time is extremely difficult and not something most… Read More NRL Recap – Round 19, 2018

With the late game on Sunday night, itself because there was no Thursday game thanks to Origin, I decided to push this out to Tuesday. That means that if you wanted a recap of the individual games, you would’ve read one by now. So that’s bought me an extra day to swallow my feelings about the… Read More NRL Recap – Round 18, 2018

The short round deserves a short recap. Melbourne and St George Illawarra played out a defence-less try-fest that was extremely entertaining, although not a game for the purists, and the Dragons left Melbourne with another loss. Penrith demolished the Warriors at home with the New Zealanders not being offered a look in against their Origin… Read More NRL Recap – Round 17, 2018

I don’t even know why we bother playing the full eighty minutes (and by “we play” I mean “I watch, you do”). Most of the games this weekend were decided in the last fifteen to twenty minutes, negating the previous hour of play. And in most of those cases, the previous hour did little to… Read More NRL Recap – Round 16, 2018

It wasn’t a particularly close round with a number of teams stamping their authority on the opposition. I don’t actually have a lot to say about it other than repeating “x team was in control against y team but may have let in a few late tries”. It wasn’t the greatest advertisement for rugby league… Read More NRL Recap – Round 15, 2018