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TOR in 2022

March 8, 2022, 3:56 pm By Joel Leave a Comment

Thanks for coming back to The Obstruction Rule for 2022.

With great pride, we want to announce that your chief analyst here has landed a gig in Clubland for this season (that club’s name has been withheld to protect the innocent). While exciting for Yours Truly, this obviously significantly impacts on the time available to maintain the site – most available time now needs to focus on helping a team, rather than leafing through a thesaurus searching for new words to describe the Tigers (but rest assured, we’ll no doubt still think they’re playing… “lamentably”).

That being said, if you’ve been leaning on the site to help you slaughter your local tipping comp, know that you haven’t been abandoned completely. The VOA Ratings page will  continue to be updated each week throughout the season, and tips will still be uploaded each Thursday. The long-form previews will have to go for the time being, but in their place, predicted margins will be added to the tips, as a kind of proxy for how confident you should feel in any particular tip.

Finally, once the season gets going and we have a better idea of how much time is available to add content to the site, it’s likely that the Features page will receive a bit more love, with the odd long-form analytics deep-dive added to give you the occasional bed-time reading.

As always, if you have any questions about particular games or teams, feel welcome to contact me on Facebook or Twitter – it’s always a pleasure chatting footy with our loyal readership.

Thanks again for your continued support over the past six years – the opportunity to work with a team is a dream come true, and wouldn’t have been possible without the site, and – most importantly – you.

Way Too Early Season Predictions:

Premiers: Melbourne

Top 4: Melbourne, Penrith, Sydney, Manly

Wooden Spoon: Wests

Most Likely to Outperform Expectations: Warriors

Most Likely to Underperform Expectations: Newcastle

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Filed Under: Editorials, NRL Features & Analysis

TOR in 2019

March 13, 2019, 1:33 pm By Joel Leave a Comment

This is a friendly notice to our regular readers that your favourite rugby league site (The Obstruction Rule, not that clunky nrl.com garbage) will be scaling back the volume this season.

As a result of other life commitments (don’t they always get in the way?!), we just won’t have time to maintain the Newsfeed this season. We’re sorry. That being said, you can get all of your breaking NRL news from our good friends over at NRL Universe, without breaking a sweat.

That said, we’re not abandoning you completely. You can still expect to find the VOA Ratings updated early each week, and we’ll have tips posted before kickoff each Thursday. We won’t have time to write the weekly War and Peace-length previews each week, but if we have something relevant to say each week, that’s where you’ll find it.

Bring on the footy.

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Filed Under: Editorials

Meninga suggests change to Test payments to benefit Tier 2 nations

March 20, 2018, 4:10 pm By Joel 1 Comment

For a start, we hate the term ‘Tier 2 nation’ in the first place (could Australia, New Zealand and England be any more condescending?) but given the tier structure’s entanglement in international eligibility, we don’t really have a choice. One day, however, we hope that won’t be the case.

And that day may come that little bit sooner, if Kangaroos coach Mal Meninga has anything to do with it. According to SMH, Meninga has suggested a radical change to Test payments, in order to encourage players to stick with the so-called ‘Tier 2 nations’.

Specifically, Meninga has put forward the idea that Australia – and, necessarily, New Zealand and England – give up their rich match payments, and have them placed into a pool, where they’d then be awarded to participants based on results.

Should New Zealand and England agree, this would be a giant step in the right direction, as it would give a team like Tonga, for example, the opportunity to not only match, but potentially out-earn a ‘Tier 1’ team like New Zealand, if they were to beat them – as they did at last year’s Rugby League World Cup.

We love the idea, but would argue it actually doesn’t go far enough. Making the payments performance-related isn’t a huge risk for the Kangaroos, who have relatively little decent competition as it is. Given their half-century long dominance, Australia would no doubt be understandably confident of winning the money back.

In a perfect world, the NRL would fund equal Test payments for all the Southern Hemisphere teams, at whatever number the game can afford. As the only major professional competition in the region, the NRL inevitably pillages the Pacific Islands of their best talent, and as a result has a moral obligation to fund those nations, as the de facto guardian for the sport in the Southern Hemisphere (likewise the RFL in the Northern Hemisphere).

The fact that the NRL hasn’t done so already is disappointing, and when they’ve then turned the pay disparity into an opportunity to poach home-grown Pacific talent like Semi Radradra and Akuila Uate on ‘residency’ grounds, it’s down-right offensive (think about it for a moment; quite literally every single top-flight Pacific Island player will inevitably become Australian or New Zealander on residency, by virtue of the fact that they’re the only two places in the region that you can play professional rugby league).

You could (and we do) argue that the ‘Tier 1’ nations shouldn’t be picking dual-eligible players in the first place, in order to encourage competitive balance; but we understand that that’s likely a bridge too far (at least at the moment).

In the meantime, addressing the pay disparity will go a long way to correcting the problem, by removing the financial sacrifices players have to make in opting for their country of heritage.

Meninga’s suggestion isn’t perfect, but it’s a huge leap forward.

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Filed Under: Editorials, NRL Features & Analysis, NRL News and Rumours Tagged With: Australia Kangaroos, Mal Meninga, New Zealand Kiwis

Eagles not cooperating, unless they were

July 21, 2017, 9:56 pm By Joel Leave a Comment

Wake us when it’s all over.

For anyone out there who cares (we don’t), SMH today reported that the Sea Eagles were refusing to cooperate with NRL investigators, specifically by not handing over privately owned laptops and mobile devices.

Shortly thereafter, the Sea Eagles released their own statement, saying that “contrary to reports today, the Manly Warringah Sea Eagles wish to advise that the club is complying with all directions and notifications provided under the current Salary Cap Investigation being conducted by the NRL Integrity Unit”.

Cool.

To be clear to our readers, we’re not even remotely interested in reading or reporting on the details of an investigation that may yet reveal nothing; about a team everybody else hates anyway.

With seven weeks remaining until the finals, we find the unsourced speculation about the competitive integrity of a competition we’re deeply invested in, to be about as interesting as watching the Bulldogs try to play attacking football.

So from here an out, you can expect The Obstruction Rule to continue to be a “Sea Eagles salary cap controversy”-free zone, until there’s some actual news to report on.

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Filed Under: Editorials, NRL Features & Analysis, NRL News and Rumours Tagged With: Manly Sea Eagles News

Starting from scratch: Where to now for Tigers?

April 24, 2017, 4:16 pm By Joel Leave a Comment

In light of the defection of home-grown stars James Tedesco, Aaron Woods and Mitch Moses from Concord, the Tigers now find themselves with a blank canvas of a roster, and plenty of money to spend. The steps taken by management over the coming weeks and months will have ramifications on the years to follow, and decide how long the Tigers spend in a “re-building phase”, and how quickly they return to NRL relevancy. With this is mind, it seems like the perfect time to take stock of exactly where the Tigers stand, and what options remain for 2018. [Read more…]

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Filed Under: Editorials, NRL Features & Analysis Tagged With: Wests Tigers News

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