Twenty odd years ago when I still playing the game I was also coaching a Under 10 side in it's formative years who would later go on to win a Group 10 Premiership as Bathurst Railway but then got hijacked by another more Ruthless organisation, but I digress, I had this kid that came to the club a couple of years before from Forbes and even though he played at half back he was one of the hardest hitting tacklers I had ever witnessed, copy book stuff where he just picked up the opposing player and drove them backward, unfortunately just like most of the Immortal John Raper's tackles they are now illegal as they go over the horizontal, they were skills from another era and they were skills that have since been outlawed.
What really upsets me is that they were some of the things that I was actually good at, I'd race into marker and rake the ball back to get our side possesion, I knew when to put on a good shoulder charge to stir the team mates up and I could play the ball forward to gain much needed ground, but when It came to ball stealing the opposition got it every time all these tricks I tried in a side that was stone motherless last are now foreign to todays clinically coached players, I suppose that these things don't make for good TV viewing, just like feeding the ball in the middle of the scrum but fair dinkum a good shoulder charge is part of the game and it's only the one in a hundred that goes wrong but we really have to accept that, Mark Geyer in the Origin in 1991 and Greg Inglis in 2012, not that much of a big deal.
