Parramatta Eels forward J’maine Hopgood suffers an ACL injury in a victory over Dragons, leaving coach Jason Ryles to lament the NRL’s insistence on speeding up the game.<\/p>\n
Former Manly prop Tof Sipley was the last men’s player referred to the judiciary, eventually receiving a four-game ban for a hip-drop tackle in round seven last year.<\/p>\n
Any suspension to Couchman would be a blow to the Dragons’ pursuit of a first win this season.<\/p>\n
The Red V have winnable clashes against Gold Coast, North Queensland and Manly in the next three weeks and will desperately want the highly rated forward on deck.<\/p>\n
A possible suspension looms as a frustrating setback for Couchman, who was restricted to only one game last season by his own anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury.<\/p>\n
![\"Ryan](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1777a44fd5e67ab3b16a4e6fed3c1c65.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Ryan Couchman’s hearing at the NRL judiciary will be held on Tuesday evening. (AAP: Mark Evans)<\/p>\n
Couchman went to the sin bin during the first half of Sunday’s 30-20 loss to Parramatta for the tackle that is suspected to have ruptured Hopgood’s right ACL.<\/p>\n
After fulltime, Eels coach Jason Ryles said such tackles were inevitable when administrators kept tweaking rules to speed the game up.<\/p>\n
“Those tackles, 99.99999 per cent of the time the boys don’t mean it. It’s not intentional,” he said.<\/p>\n
“But unfortunately you keep throwing fatigue into the game and you keep making them even more tired, they happen.”<\/p>\n
Elsewhere, North Queensland centre Tom Chester is set to miss Saturday’s match against Melbourne following his high shot on Gold Coast fullback Jayden Campbell.<\/p>\n
Chester went to the sin bin for the cover tackle on Campbell late in the Cowboys’ 30-16 defeat of the Titans on Sunday.<\/p>\n
He will miss an additional match against the Dragons if he unsuccessfully challenges his grade-two careless high tackle charge at the judiciary.<\/p>\n
Chester is likely to be replaced by Zac Laybutt in the starting line-up against the Storm in round four.<\/p>\n
AAP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"St George Illawarra forward Ryan Couchman has been summoned by the NRL judiciary to explain himself over the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558325,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[568],"tags":[5844,64,63,4027,30241,77424,275564,761,762,158,54475,588,85],"class_list":["post-558324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nrl","tag-abc-sport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-dragons","tag-eels","tag-hip-drop","tag-jmaine-hopgood","tag-national-rugby-league","tag-nationalrugbyleague","tag-nrl","tag-ryan-couchman","tag-sport","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}