Hip drops and hooligans
Hip drops and hooligans
As long as you're trying to strip the ball, murder is legal.
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Ok where were we?
Talk about biblical resonance on Good Friday, as Jacob Preston was absolutely martyred by the High Court as he was sin binned for what was described as a hip drop tackle on South Sydney winger Izaac Tu’itupou Thompson.
Social media absolutely lit up from the incident as people rushed to pick a side. Either you thought it was a blatant hip drop mechanism, or you thought it was political correctness gone mad.
Me? I was firmly in the former camp. Let’s review the incident (for some reason Twitter is restricting embeds at the moment so click through to see the incident, and follow NRL Physio while you’re there if you don’t already).
Jacob Preston hip drop tackle (NRL Physio).
Now what constitutes a hip drop tackle? Well Graham Annesley, in a briefing to the media last year, laid out key indicators to a hip drop. They are as follows:
Defender will generally have a grip of the opposition player, using that grip to lift or maintain body weight to then drop or swing their hip/s around.
The defender usually swivels their nearest hip away from the body, dropping their hips and/or lower body onto the opposition player's body/lower limbs.
The defender lands their body weight on the lower leg/s to stop the opposition player's momentum, trapping the lower limb into a dangerous position with weight and force.
Now let’s go back to Preston’s incident and run through the checklist.
Does he have a grip of Thompson and use it to maintain body weight and swing? Yes, his left arm is around the shoulder of Thompson while the right is around the ball.
Does he swivel his hip away and drop onto Thompson’s lower leg? Yes, pretty clearly. Preston leaves his feet by swinging his legs and hips all the way around, rolling up on Thompson’s ankle.
The issue with the hip drop is it is a dangerous mechanism that has potential to cause serious injury to the ball carrier. It is a failure in technique caused by a tackle that has gone wrong, and is usually an act of desperation or laziness by a defender to try and stop a ball carrier via any means necessary.
Think about the dastardly “wrestle” for a second. Anyone who claims the wrestle has gone is lying to you. Players train in a multitude of combat forms all the time in an effort to aid their tackling technique and slow down the opposition, including things like jiu-jitsu and judo. It’s not illegal, it’s a practice as old as time.
The hip drop is a bad judo throw in essence. Are they malicious? No, I honestly believe that players don’t go out intending to torpedo each others’ lower legs. But lack of intent doesn’t excuse action, and that seems to be the biggest boundary in the discourse around this.
My one irk is how it took the Bunker an entire set to go back and penalise, report and sin bin Preston. I saw some chat about maybe not penalising him given the fact a full set had been played, but still retrospectively sin binning him, which I agreed with at the time, but on reflection I don’t really see how you have one without the other.
It wouldn’t have made sense to me for Preston to be binned and then Souths not reap immediate benefits of possession, further up the field too, so I’m happy to accept that interpretation of it.
I can understand some of the initial confusion around the incident. It doesn’t “look” like a textbook hip drop tackle. I completely missed it live (as did the referees clearly), and it took a couple of goes on replay before I realised what I was seeing.
You would usually see a hip drop by a player latching on high from behind, dragging down and swinging onto the back of the legs. Preston was more side on, with one hand high and one hand low, and swings around the front. All very abstract.
The fact it looks funky and different though has apparently meant that it’s all sweet because it didn’t look like the other hip drop tackles used in the example briefing notes. Well that’s obviously irrelevant. But what’s annoyed me far more than it probably should is the justification of the incident. Let’s run through my favourites.
“He’s just trying to strip the ball.”
Ok? What’s your point?
Just because you don’t intend to hip drop a guy, doesn’t absolve you for when you actually do it. Players generally don’t mean to coathanger or behead each other, right? Doesn’t mean it isn’t punished when it happens. Can’t wait for the joke of “he’s just going for a strip” the next time someone gets spear tackled into Middle Earth.
“It was an unfortunate incident.”
It was. Unfortunate incidents are a part of the game. That is also not a legal defence for an illegal manoeuvre, unfortunate or not.
“What else was he supposed to do?”
Well for one, be better at tackling and not get beaten in contact so easily that you end up in the position where you’re holding on for dear life. There is a time and place to go for a steal of possession, and it’s probably not when you’re isolated with a charging outside back.
I like Jacob Preston, a lot, this isn’t a vendetta against him at all, and I love what the Bulldogs have been doing this year. I spent a not insignificant portion of my last edition gushing about Preston’s start to his career, in a bigger examination of how the Bulldogs have reconnected to the area and their loyal fans (check it out below if you haven’t already).
The hip drop tackle and all associated mechanisms are dangerous, end of discussion. There is a reason the NRL is actively scrutinising and magnifying these incidents, because they want them out of the game.
The long bows have to stop. Being injured in a rugby league move is part of the game, and everyone accepts that.
Bailey Simonsson, in the Grand Final last year, hurt his shoulder on that chasedown (some might say Sattleresque) tackle from Dylan Edwards. He was tackled, threw his arm out to break his fall, and the damage was done. Did anyone blame Edwards? No, it was a legal rugby league tackle.
The hip drop is not a rugby league move, and if you end up in that position, intentional or otherwise, you have to bear the consequences.