Phil Gould has pushed back against the idea of an 18th man being introduced into the NRL, saying that clubs would game the system unfairly.
"We started with blood bins, we started with head bins ... they will cheat the system, they just do. It's in their nature - anything to get an edge," he told James Bracey on Wide World of Sports' Six Tackles with Gus podcast.
"The last thing you want to do is have Benji Marshall playing until he's 48, being the 18th player for some team every week because he can come on and win you a game in the last two or three minutes - or some proficient field-goal kicker or proficient goal kicker who can come on late and make a difference."
"Coaches can come up with that [an excuse to use the 18th man] if they try hard."
The NRL announced yesterday that as of next weekend, an 18th player will be added to game day squads - to be used as a concussion substitute that will only be triggered if three of his teammates fail head injury assessments.
The extra man must be an 'emerging player', with the definition of an 'emerging player' still to be determined by the NRL.
"Who is the emerging player? The player that's had no NRL games, the player that's had one to ten NRL games? The player that's under 20 years of age, under 22 years of age - what's an emerging player?" Gould asked.
"Will we go to a 19th player, a 20th player, sit 13 blokes on the bench? Where does it end? So they had to put some restriction on what that 18th player could represent."
He said that with the restrictions in place, it was unlikely we would ever see the 18th man used legitimately.
"You're not going to see that [three failed HIAs] very often. If you provided them with an 18th player ... every club will use that 18th player. They'll find a way to get there, they're already cheating the HIA rules as it is," Gould said.
"We get a weekend where we get some genuine HIAs and a team gets into a little bit of trouble, that's the nature of the game for me. You've got 17 players for god's sake, if you can't get through the 80 minutes with 17 players, too bad."
Gould said the rule change was "reactionary".
"In saying that, I always felt that this was going to be a natural progression with the HIA," he said.
"The way we are treating head injuries as though they're life-threatening and someone's going to die tomorrow, I find extraordinary.
"I'm not going to get into an argument about concussion and what they're trying to save and not trying to save, at the moment you're trying to save litigation. Nothing else."
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from WWOS https://wwos.nine.com.au/nrl/nrl-2021-fixtures-results-ladder-scores-phil-gould-questions-concussion-sub/75453be6-6862-4318-beb0-87145d95af5c
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