Class





I know your serious as well.

Scathing self-critique. But, I suppose, fair comment





But if you could, that wouldn't help. At all.





There is a lot of truth in that. Many passes are called forward by the crowd for the sake of it, but every week there are blatant forward passes, which instinctively half the crowd instantly sees and calls, yet the officials ignore. It puzzles me. I have to assume this is done on instructions as I don;ty believe the officials are the only people in the ground who don't see it.

Rather than trying to find a better way to interpret the current wording of the rule, why not just change the rule to require the player receiving the ball to have been no further forward than the player passing the ball at the moment the ball was released AND at the point at which they receive the ball, with the only exception to the second part being if the player passing the ball was prevented from progressing further by a defending player.



It would then be easy to judge forward passes for the VR as it would effectively be exactly the same as deciding whether a player was onside when the ball is kicked.

Technically they could put a GPS chip in the ball which would calculate initial velocity and final velocity over start and finish position. This could trigger a heat sensor in the ball which if forward, this would make the rugby ball too hot to handle and the receiver would drop the ball. This converts a forward pass into a knock on which the ref and video ref can confirm.........easy.

You do know that GPS isn't a pin point accurate system don't you?

No they don’t unfortunately.



With a kick, you can roughly see where the kick is taken, and where the player receiving the ball is at the time of the kick.



With a pass, if the player delivers the ball with the hands pointing towards his own team, due to physics, the ball could travel in a forwards trajectory, depending on the speed the player is moving at.



Momentum, physics, call it what you want, it’s very difficult to police, unless they just say, if the ball ends up in front of where it was passed, it’s forwards, only then could you use the same system as the kick.



But to be honest, there’s a number of try’s scored from kicks where the referee doesn’t bother using the technology, when perhaps he should.

Hmmm I'll give you the benefit of doubt.

Yes, but it's accurate in the UK to around 5 metres, and for forward passes, that beats most refs, and all touchies.

Good to see level of debate, I say put blatent forward passes to the vid ref.

True, true.

Which chap put my wind up idea about the GPS on the BBC Manchester Radio, it was read out more or less word for word, the rugby radio commentators had a right good life but was unsure if it was possible.



So I,ve developed the idea a bit further for accuracy, to get it accurate to 600mm (2 feet) instead of using the intersection of 7 satellites we could put some GPS responders high up on each corner of the ground , cross hairing 4 signals will give us this accuracy, also I,ve developed a soft alloy which would be integrated into the ball this would have the heat sensor and emitter so that the forward pass receiver would drop the ball within 2 seconds, just to speed the game up.



Do you think we should patent this idea under rugby league fans research and developments before other sports catch on to its potential.

I'm sure when I proposed this about 3 years ago, you said it wouldn't be possible.