Why the set restart is ruining the NRL – and why the stats prove it, too

As the legal phrase has it, possession is nine tenths of the law. If it’s in your hands, you’re doing well.

Rugby league statistics would agree. As far as key indicators of victory go, there’s three that really matter: Total Sets, the amount of attempts to score that a team receives; Run Metres, the amount of distance a team covers with ball in hand; and Line Breaks, which is obvious.

Those three, combined, can get you 90% of the way to working out who should win a game. Who had the ball, how well they carried it forwards, how often they broke through.

There’s a side order of Tackles inside 20m, which gives you a flavour of where the ball was for most of the game, but that is a bit noisy and can punish teams who get into position and score efficiently while rewarding those who hit a brick wall on the opponent’s try line.

Watching the NRL in 2025, you might add another: set restarts.

The proliferation of overhead hand-waving this year in the NRL is well-established, with around 20% more set restarts given this year compared to previous years.

The only year in which more have been awarded was 2021, when they were applicable in 100% of the field as opposed to just 60%, and which you will also remember as a terrible year of rugby league.

If you can’t go back that far, feel free to watch Jason Saab’s try compilation from that year, which features Dan Ginnane saying ‘goodbye’ more than an Irish person trying to leave a wedding.

In fact, you don’t have to remember it, because the NRL accepted as much by changing the rules immediately after it to remove the yardage set restart.

As far as set restarts go, there’s two issues at play. One is tactical, one is political, but both together are having huge impacts on the game as played in 2025.

Let’s start with the tactics. Rugby league changes its rules constantly, often within seasons and even week-to-week.

Even this year in the NRL, we’ve seen high tackles thresholds moved and a change in the time period in which the Bunker can rule on them, as well as re-writings of roll balls that come and go from week to week.

Last year, we had the disruptor – not sighted at all in 2025 – and the kick blocker, which was a huge issue when the Panthers were winning but mysteriously isn’t now they’re not.

With so much upheaval in coaching, half of the sport is just a cat-and-mouse between officials and coaches. The new rule comes in, coaches work out how to circumvent it, then the rule either goes away or changes again.

In a sport like soccer, where you could argue that (pre VAR at least) the rules barely changed in a century, this would be anathema, but in rugby league, a major shake-up to the rules is just another week’s news cycle til there’s a player transfer or an off-field incident and we get to talk about something else.

This has been the case since 1895 and, broadly, is fine. It’s all part of the rich tapestry of rugby league and, if you squint, even a little bit fun.

This was covered in these pages earlier in the year but it’s worth a quick recap.

The set restart came in because the Roosters realised they could lie all over tackles on their own goalline, knowing that the refs would chicken out of binning players for repeated infringements while their defenders were increasingly able to withstand extended periods of pressure if the game was constantly broken up.

After Easts had won two comps and the set restart came in, Penrith realised you could get out of your end using backline metres, cage teams in the corner with kicking and use your middles to keep them there, before a combination of Six Agains and repeat sets ensured that all the game was played one end of the field.

In response to that, the NRL decided that short dropouts should be a thing, limiting the utility of repeat set kicking, which has gradually weakened the Panthers’ grasp.

One could go back further – remember when they invented the seven-tackle set when people realised Billy Slater returned the footy too well? – but that’s a potted history of knee-jerk decisions that bring us to this point.

Guess what? Now we get a faster game, which was at least some of the point, but a far less accountable one, as the most crucial element of who wins a footy match – who has the ball the most – is manipulated in a seemingly random, arbitrary process by the referee.

Round 8 saw quite a funny juxtaposition of this.

Referees were pilloried for applying the high tackle rule differently, as the game was stopped repeatedly while the Bunker found head contact from several tackles ago, allowing the TV cameras to dissect each call on its merits.

But when it came to the actual decisions that impact who wins and loses far more than sin bins do, there was never time to look into it.

Ashley Klein gave five set restarts to zero in the second half of the Canberra v Dolphins game, allowing a 24 sets to 13 total sets shift in favour of the Raiders and eventually turning a 32-10 Redcliffe lead into a 40-32 defeat.

It was far from the first time that this has happened.

Manly lost a count 11-2 to the Warriors in Round 2, then won one 7-1 a week later against Canberra. Did they play differently? Not really.

Since that night in Auckland, they have conceded 13 set restarts in total across six whole games, which doesn’t exactly sound like a team trying to cheat the ruck.

Penrith had a 5-0 win in the second half against Souths, almost coming back from 28-0 down in the process; the Roosters upset Brisbane on the back of a 5-1 first half in their favour; the Dragons lost counts 5-1 to Souths and 5-2 to Parramatta, both times going down by a single point.

Were these counts correct? Who knows? We got no analysis, no replays, nothing.

These are serious swings in the most contributory factor to victory, essentially thrown into a random infringement generator and then never scrutinised.

If there were a pattern, there might be consistency, but it’s hard to believe that Manly were the worst offenders of the season one week and then the most offended against the next, as the numbers suggest.

The tactics of it are clear to anyone who watches the game. In certain situations, sides will deliberately give set restarts away to slow rucks down and set the line.

This happens against poor sides, when the defence feels it is well rested and, particularly, early in the tackle count.

In this sense, it’s not much different to the deliberate expiration of the time clock that is currently in vogue, or to what the Roosters used to do and the Trent Robinson gambit that refs will be too afraid to bin someone for professional fouls or repeat infringements still holds.

In other situations, it favours the attack, who can play conservatively and await free sets doled out by the referee, knowing that a random klaxon will sound in their favour. Do that enough and you’ll get points through patience, or at the very least, play the game at the right end of the field.

Red zone attacking efficiency certainly hasn’t gone up, but according to Rugby League Eye Test, tries after set restarts have spiked by a third.

What is most frustrating about all of this is that, despite a media environment that loves talking about officiating more than just about anything else, we’ve barely heard a peep about set restarts.

The game is booming and has been since Peter V’Landys took over during Covid, which is when the set restarts came in. PVL + 6A = $$$.

Correlation and causation are not necessarily the same thing, however: a hundred outside factors, some of which are also from the brain of V’Landys, some of which are not, play into the success of the NRL.

Piling up possession with one side, you’ll be surprised to hear, increases scoring.

People like tries, so that must be great – except in 2021, V’Landys et al walked it back massively when they realised that they were all being scored by one of the teams, which wasn’t great for getting viewers to watch to the end of the game.

Piling up possession randomly, as we are seeing this year, will occasionally result in highly unpredictable results and upsets, but goes down like a cup of cold sick with the coaches, who are some of the game’s biggest stakeholders and public faces.

Coaches who know more about the game than anyone else and who spend their lives trying to pick it apart, aren’t massive fans of their best laid plans being massacred on the altar of randomness.

If you’ve missed them complaining, it’s no accident. The NRL put down an edict that they aren’t to criticise refs at all, even broadly.

The prior guideline on what was likely to earn a coach a fine surrounded criticising the integrity of the officials, which was fair enough, but the 2025 interpretation discourages criticism on a more systematic level.

“You tell me, because I’m not allowed to,” was a Ricky Stuart response when questioned about the 1-7 count his side lost to Manly.

The NRL also removed Head of Football Graham Annesley’s weekly media appearance, removing the media’s ability to discuss set restarts and the havoc they wreak with the man in charge of them.

Then, they sent a passive aggressive letter to broadcasters suggesting that they no longer talk about the rules, with Phil Gould performatively walking off Channel 9’s 100% Footy when talk questioned about set restarts.

Gus is both a media commentator and the Canterbury Bulldogs General Manager of Football – why not, it’s rugby league! – and clearly wanted to make a point about the gag order in place. It was, in his own way, the Jose Mourinho ‘If I speak I am in big trouble’ meme.

Perhaps football is a good metaphor for this whole farrago.

Their rules are generally been a lot more vague than rugby league, but the introduction of VAR brought scrutiny on the minutiae to the point where the fabric of the game changed.

Pre VAR, it was often said on commentary that a penalty could be given on every corner if so desired, such was the level of jostling and shirt holding, only for intrusive video to go right ahead and prove it.

A similar heuristic could apply to the ruck in rugby league, where countless unseen acts go on in an attempt to slow (or speed) up the play the ball.

This isn’t the officials’ fault, by the way. We used to have two refs, one to do the ruck and one to do everything else, but now we have one and they have to do twice as much, with someone second guessing them in their ear the whole time.

At a time when we put more emphasis on the speed of the game than ever, and when we scrutinise certain decisions like never before, the decision making has gone back to that of one person from ten metres away.

Then, we ignore what happens anyway. Once upon a time we stopped to look at holding down penalties, slow releases and flops, but now, with a wave of a hand, on we go. If a try happens in the next set, the existence of that set never gets a discussion.

Accepting mistakes is not in the PVL playbook, so it is highly unlikely anything will change.

Internally, Graham Annesley’s phone will be running off the hook with 17 coaches asking him to explain what it is that they actually need to train to be successful under this framework.

For us external fans, just like those on the field, it’ll be play on, back to the start, please don’t ask any questions.