At the start of the week, I received a phone call from a friend. A fella who’s in roughly the same line of work as me, he was frustrated to the point of distraction.

His gripe was this: two fantastic preliminary semi-finals over the weekend had been hijacked by editorialising over the rules. As consumers of rugby league, he felt we had been robbed of the opportunity to bask in the glory of two one-point thrillers in as many days.

I agreed with his observation, but not with his thoughts on the reasons behind it.

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Radio and television commentators will always offer opinions but it is true those thoughts seemed to swamp the weekend’s coverage to such an extent that if you saw or heard the broadcasts, the manifestos on rules would have dominated your post-match thinking.

Trent Hodgkinson’s heroics were overlooked in all the hoo-ha. Photo: Getty

This was particularly true on Saturday night, with the no-punching edict and the laws about the ball hitting the referee seeming to get much more airtime than Trent Hodkinson’s match-winning field goal for Canterbury.

I don’t agree commentators should in some way be gagged from extended editorialising during the game. Rather, I believe our game should be set up in such a way that they won’t bother because they know they would be wasting their breath.

Would soccer commentators waste time during a World Cup semi-final debating whether the goals should be a metre wider or the offside rule should change? Highly unlikely, because their sport is so widely played and so steeped in tradition that it would be like calling for the abolition of Santa Claus.

Rugby league is so small, and its Australian administration so inward-looking, that if between 20 and 30 people were in agreement that a rule should change, it WOULD CHANGE.

That’s all it takes – and every single one of those 20 or 30 people is an Australian male.

The club coaches are the enemies of those trying to keep – or make, depending your perspective – rugby league entertaining. The rule makers are at war with club coaches whose only objective is to win.

The result of this perception − that out of 500,000 rugby league players worldwide, only 450 of them matter − is that we are never satisfied. We have little reverence for the past. We change things every five minutes. We are always just trying outwit those conniving coaches.

I don’t believe the NRL should have any authority over the rules of rugby league. Do the ARU or FFA set the rules for their sports? I certainly don’t think the same coaches who are trying to exploit those rules should be on a committee that makes them.

The club coaches are the enemies of those trying to keep – or make, depending your perspective – rugby league entertaining. The rule makers are at war with club coaches whose only objective is to win.

The Rugby League International Federation, which is about to get a CEO and a headquarters for the first time, should set the rules under which the game is played everywhere.

They can consult whoever they like. There should be only one set of these rules.

And if banning the punch leads to more problems which need policing, the application to change those interpretations should go through the RLIF and should take a year or more to ratify, just like in other sports. And when the changes are ratified, they should apply everywhere the game is played.

And if things are unfair or inequitable in the meantime, we should just suck it up and copy it.

And we wouldn’t waste time whinging about bad rules because we would know there was nothing we could do to change them.

I would rather have bad rules that everyone accepts than good ones which everyone constantly whines about.