MELBOURNE coach Craig Bellamy says the impact of the NRL’s new rules will be felt more harshly with the addition of Perth and Papua New Guinea.
Bellamy was speaking after a new kick-off rule was trialled in his team’s 46-20 win over Brisbane at Suncorp Stadium on Thursday night.
“I’d be concerned, if I was running the game – obviously it’s not my business – with the six-agains,” the veteran coach said.
“When you’ve got to back up, back up, keep making tackles … before, obviously it was a penalty and you’ve got … it might be 2 seconds rest, 30 seconds.
“With these six agains, it’s bringing raw fatigue into the game.”
The 66-year-old said the impact of that fatigue would be more apparent when Perth joins – or rejoins – the competition next year, followed by PNG Chiefs in 2028.
“Especially with the new teams coming in…” he continued.
“I might be right off here but at the end of the day we need to be a bit aware that we are going to need more players playing our game so we’ve got players who can play at the top level.
“With so many different sports around now … when I was a kid, if you didn’t play rugby league in NSW or Queensland you didn’t play anything. Nowadays there’’s rugby union and there’s soccer and there’s AFL making a big indent.
“We don’t want to be burning our big guys out and then there will be even less players playing. If their career’s gonna span five or six years because of the amount of work they have to do and because of the pace of the game … we’ve got to have a bit of a think about how we’re doing things.”
NSW and Tonga star Addin Fonua-Blake said at the start of the year that recent rules changes favoured small players, to the detriment of those like him.
Bellamy offered: “When you’re having six against and you’re making 24 tackles in a row, that’s got to take some steam out of the big blokes.
“We have to be careful bringing these new team in a make sure we’ve got numbers so we’ve got an even competition.
“Because that’s what TV viewers want and people going to games. They don’t want lopsided scores, they want close games.
