Mitchell Moses played the rules and won. This is how the NRL can stop it happening again — Michael Crawley

If Mitchell Moses knew that winning that challenge meant his night was done, he never rolls the dice.

Think about how quickly that sorts out the problem. You stay down or challenge claiming contact to the head, and the Bunker agrees with you?

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Fair enough. Your team gets the penalty. But because you just convinced the officials you took illegal contact to the skull, player safety takes over. It does not matter if you are the star halfback, the goalkicker, or a prop taking a hit-up. Whoever you are, you sit down. You walk straight up the tunnel for a mandatory 15-minute Head Injury Assessment.

Moses has form here. He is one of the sharpest operators in the competition when it comes to the rulebook. We have seen him leave his kicking leg dangling in the air to invite contact, stay down to force a Bunker review, and challenge where he knows high contact trumps everything else. It is calculated, professional, and he plays right to the edge.

The footy itself at CommBank Stadium was no classic. Parramatta’s season was already over, so with no pressure on them, they threw the ball around and ripped in. The Cowboys arrived in Sydney with everything on the line, felt the squeeze, and choked. They had plenty of chances to ice the match and butchered them.

Yet the entire post-match wash-up landed on a freeze-frame whistle, a call neither team would ever want deciding a season.

Todd Payten did not look for an easy way out in the press conference.

“It’s our own fault,” Payten said. “But I would hate for a big game to be decided by that call. He had dropped the ball, the play was essentially dead, and for the Bunker to intervene like that, it’s hard to cop. Mitch is on the ground, but we had several chances to ice the game. You get what you deserve.”

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Reuben Cotter backed his coach, asking for basic common sense when a defender is flat-out diving for a loose football.

Then Moses fronted up and leaned straight into the black-and-white wording of the rulebook.

“If you get hit in the head, you get hit in the head. Obviously, I am very low, I understand that, but I got hit in the head. I am just playing by the rules.”

Jason Ryles summed up the coach’s reality: “We don’t make the rules, we just play by them.”

That is the reality of where we are.

If head office can expand the competition, bring in new teams, and prop up the Super League with the stroke of a pen, they can easily fix this rule before the finals begin.

Every fan wants to protect players from head trauma. Nobody wants foul play, and nobody wants to see reckless swinging arms or shoulder charges. When that happens, send the offender straight to the sin bin. The game has already accepted that when two heads clash in a tackle, it is an unavoidable accident and play rolls on.

The two points Parramatta received to win that match did not come from anything dangerous. When Moses was ankle-tapped, he collapsed toward the turf and lost the ball. Tom Chester was sprinting at top speed to dive on the loose pill. When an attacker drops three feet in a fraction of a second, a defender cannot defy gravity and vanish into thin air. It was a glancing brush, yet the Bunker treats a defender making a desperate play on the ball like he committed deliberate foul play.

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The fix to tidy this up before the big games is simple:

First, introduce a sudden drop rule. If a ball carrier drops abruptly from a slip, dive, or ankle-tap, and the defender has already committed to a legal line of contest, any incidental contact is ruled an accident and play continues.

Second, pull the pin on super slow-motion when judging impact. If contact does not look like a penalty at full game speed, it is not a penalty. Slow motion should be reserved for the sideline chalk and grounding the football.

Finally, bring in the mandatory HIA deterrent. You can challenge, and you can win the penalty, but if an allegation of head contact is made, the player involved goes straight to the dressing room for an assessment. No exceptions. Whoever you are, you sit down.

Protect the players and look after the head, but stop punishing defenders for the laws of physics. We can fix this simply before the finals kick off, because no footy fan wants to see a season decided on an accidental love tap.

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