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

September 14, 2026 — 5:30pm

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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........

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