The NRL’s hip-drop headache is back, and this time, there’s a whole new interpretation, and the numbers don’t add up.<\/p>\n
Two tackles. Two Eels victims. Two different outcomes.<\/p>\n
Once again, a game that asks whether its judiciary has any idea where the line is.<\/p>\n
There’s a significant call for “blanket” suspensions across the NRL<\/a>.<\/p>\n Dragons forward Ryan Couchman<\/a> was handed a four-game ban last week after his tackle on Parramatta’s J’maine Hopgood<\/a> ended the forward’s season with a ruptured ACL.<\/p>\n Couchman, who spent all of 2025 on the sidelines with an injury himself, was referred straight to the judiciary despite having a clean record.\u00a0<\/p>\n The young Dragons forward was suspended for four games, with his return to be around ANZAC Day.\u00a0<\/p>\n Less than a week later, Panthers hooker Mitch Kenny<\/a> was charged with a strikingly similar tackle on Eels fullback Isaiah Iongi<\/a>.<\/p>\n The result? One match on the sideline.<\/p>\n Iongi faces two months on the shelf with a syndesmosis injury.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ivan Cleary<\/a>, after the Panthers-Eels game, spoke disappointingly on the call, expressing how murky the waters are surrounding the rules.<\/p>\n “It actually isn’t a hip-drop; it’s dangerous contact. What once was a hip-drop is now dangerous contact, that’s been brought into that context,” Cleary expressed.<\/p>\n “It’s just an eye for an eye – Izzy got injured, Mitch landed on the back of his leg.”<\/p>\n The suspicion among many is that injury severity is quietly influencing suspensions.<\/p>\n Despite the NRL’s insistence that outcomes shouldn’t determine punishment.\u00a0<\/p>\n It’s a grey area the game can ill afford, and Roosters great Bryan Fletcher has had enough of it.<\/p>\n “Players don’t mean it,” he expressed on SEN’s The Run Home.<\/p>\n “Couchman got four weeks, and the Mitch Kenny<\/a> one is just [as bad], if not worse.<\/p>\n “You had a precedent, and you can’t use ‘the injury has something to do with it’.<\/p>\n “I’m hoping they didn’t take that into consideration, but the Mitch Kenny<\/a> [tackle] is exactly the same as Couchman’s, and you’ve got to call it as you see it.<\/p>\n “I’m just talking purely about the suspension, I feel so sorry for young Couchman. Neither player means it, it’s gotta be a blanket [rule].”\u00a0<\/p>\n