starting going right back to last Thursday night and this one again created some discussion this was in the Panthers and storm game uh now this was a 20 M restart so I'll play The Vision uh firstly and uh it's more this is more by way of I guess explanation and education than anything else but if you'll see you'll see here from the kick uh from Nathan cley and the ball bounces takes a big bounce forward goes over the dead ball line uh Grant and Anderson brings the ball back very quickly looks like he's going to take a quick tap uh then kind of FS to take the tap passes the ball back to penous who kicks the ball down field and the ball goes into touch after bouncing in the FI of play now that um and you can see the referee here he's saying it's a scrum because if you kick the ball into touch from any restart of play the team that kicks gets the loose head and the feed and the scrum now this resulted in a captain's ch chenge uh and the captain's challenge was about whether the ball had been tapped to restart the play or not and again to by way of Education the ball for a 20m restart doesn't have to be a tap kick so you can see Anderson runs up here it's more to try and fool the defense I think that anything else stops passes the ball to penous who then kicks the ball punt kick now that is a perfectly legitimate restarted play from the 20 M Zone you know more often than not of course we see them put the ball on the ground and tap it or just uh drop it onto their foot and tap it and they'll continue running uh but this is obviously a tactical uh ploy to try and uh catch the defense off guard uh kick the ball well down field and if you can find touch uh you'll be rewarded with a scrum with the feed and the loose so again just to try and clarify what was going on here but we come back and the reason that this turned into a penalty so a couple of aspects of this firstly that's there's nothing wrong with the way this was restarted with the exception of uh we've got a player over here who's in front of the line when the Kick's taken now in these particular incidents you'll see that um Jack howth in this particular case is in front of the kick if that was a tap kick uh and he was on his way back from further down field the referee will usually kind of blow their whistle and say stop stop stop you've got players off site um and if they do take the tap they'll generally say take it again your players are still coming back on side but in this case uh howth was not coming back on side he was already on side so you can see where he's coming from and for some uh reason best known to Jack he just overruns the line and he's in an offside position so I'll come back to an incident later where we we see a similar incident from a restart of play where a player is in front of the kicker and um this is a mandatory uh penalty in this case because of a couple of factors the first factor is that this was the subject of a captain's challenge uh and the the C The Challenge in the bunker can only uh rule on the laws of the game so uh you know the bun it would look ridiculous if the bunker said go back and let uh penen take the kick again like firstly the odds of him finding touch again with a second kick uh almost non-existent because the defense would have dropped back so you can't kind of replay the point in that situation and and give them an opportunity to come up with the same outcome so if you've got a player in front of the kicker on a restart of play uh then in this situation the bunker had no option but to rule that that was a penalty right in front of the post anything on that one could it have been superseded by the fact he's not on the mark now look the referee I mean you can see I had a lot of our grounds there is no hash mark in the middle of the of the line the referee uh is it the judge of whether the player takes it exactly on the spot or not you'll see in most of our incidents in our games the referees don't even give a Mark if they award a penalty it's not like in Rugby Union where they'll kind of go over and they'll put their heel into the ground and say there's your mark uh so it's a kind of a general vicinity now I mean if that was 10 m offline uh then different story uh but if the referee feels that they're in the general vicinity then that you know that's good enough for that type of kick