Cleary sin bin highlights flawed rule that needs to be changed immediately

The Nathan Cleary kerfuffle? In sin-binning him, referee Gerard Sutton applied the rule correctly.

The rule has a good overall purpose – to save kickers from being ironed out late. But the rule is also one of those flawed pieces of writing that turns a harmless accident into a binary outcome with outsized consequences .

Kickers need to be protected from a defender trying recklessly to flatten them, not one who, attempting a charge down, runs past and clips (or is clipped by, it doesn’t matter) the kicker’s leg.

The rule, by reducing the violation to the fact of the contact rather than the defensive player’s intent, is one of those easy ways out favoured by lawmakers, who like things in black and white.

For Cleary to have been suspended would be to compound the error. He was handed a grade-one dangerous contact charge on Monday morning and is free to play in the preliminary final.

It is similar to when rugby union turned an attempted intercept into a red-card offence: a simple-minded rule of staggering stupidity that routinely wrecks games.

Rugby league, characterised by its pragmatism, has largely managed to avoid the self-defeating legalistic quicksand into which union has sunk. League boss Peter V’landys usually asks, “What would rugby union do?” and does the opposite.

For the sake of Sunday’s game, Cleary’s 10 minutes in the bin were the critical period when Penrith proved themselves the better team. But this rule could do with some instant redrafting: give the referee some discretion over whether the contact merits a sin-binning, and if it is incidental contact, award the penalty where the act takes place, not downfield where the kick lands.

And don’t even talk about harsher sanctions, unless you want to follow rugby union down the forensic gurgler.

In recent months the top four teams have been playing in a different division from the rest, and this was underscored with the qualifying finals markedly superior in quality to the eliminators.

All four weekend finals matches were tight, entertaining, sweaty-palms affairs, characterised by tough defence and conservative attacking game plans. Notably, there was an average of seven set restarts per clash and only three in the Panthers-Roosters epic. Refereed more like Origin, the games were better for it.

A week ago, Harry Grant had his integrity questioned for criticising the high number of six agains. The refereeing of the finals was the best way for the NRL to concede, just quietly, that Grant was right.

So we can’t have a Penrith-Warriors grand final any more. But the Dolphins’ win in Auckland , which upset that applecart, raises the tantalising prospect of the NRL’s most exhilarating attacking line-up making the big day.

Of the eight teams that played on the weekend, the Dolphins were alone, when under pressure, in damning the torpedoes, unleashing their instincts and uninhibitedly setting themselves to score their way out of trouble.