It was unfortunate to see rising Manly star Tom Trbojevic injured during the Sea Eagles' clash with the Broncos on Saturday night, but I don't think the rules need to be changed because of what happened. Defending players have rules in place to protect them when they are contesting the high ball because the attacking players have all the momentum and the defender is a sitting duck. But once the ball is allowed to bounce it is fair game, no matter which direction the ball goes after hitting the ground.

You simply can't make rules to cover every possible situation because it may lead to an injury. The worst injury we have had in our game in recent years was clearly the broken neck suffered by Alex McKinnon. There were rules in place to prevent that happening, but the tackle only had to go slightly wrong and the results were devastating. There is a risk you'll be hurt at some point, every time you run out onto the field.

Tom Trbojevic Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images

We have to be careful that we don't change the fabric of the game too much in an attempt to make it completely safe, because the game will never be completely safe. If we mess with it too much, it will end up being touch football. One of the great strengths of our game is its physicality and brutality, it sets rugby league apart from a lot of other sports and I believe it is a large part of its popularity.

Another area where I think the rules are fine is with decoy runners making contact with defenders. The NRL have tried to make this area of the game as straight-forward as possible and it basically comes down to being the responsibility of the decoy runner to avoid making contact with a defender in a way which will impede that player.

Over the weekend there were a few examples of defenders reacting in an overly theatrical manner to contact by decoy runners, but in each case I thought the referees got the decision right. If you go back a couple of weeks to the incident where Paul Gallen fell down after being grabbed by Aaron Woods, the right decision was made there, too. Woods has to keep his hands to himself in that situation.

It is a bad look when defenders appear to be taking dives, but the players know the rules and they are making it obvious to the officials that the rule has been breached. As a decoy runner, you have to make sure you finish on the inside shoulder of the defender, you can't make contact with the outside shoulder or stop in the defensive line. The really good decoy runners either run straight through the line, they prop and step inside the defender to avoid the outside shoulder or they run a line which takes them well away from the defender. There are sides like the Roosters, the Dragons and Storm who you rarely see penalised, because they run their decoy plays so well.

Paul Gallen who was accused of diving against the Tigers. Cameron Spencer/Getty Images

The rules need to be as clear as possible to protect the match officials from criticism. If you leave too much to interpretation, you leave the officials open to far more scrutiny. If the referees have to start making calls on the integrity of players, determining whether or not they overacted to contact, you open up a whole can of worms. The onus has to be on the players to play within the rules as they stand.

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There is room however for some common sense to come into play with calls on things like forward passes. I'd like to see a "common sense" button installed in the bunker. The rules currently state that the bunker can't make a call on a forward pass. That decision was based on the difficulty in making those calls from the limited number of camera angles involved. But seriously, over the weekend there were a number of passes which were so clearly forward to everyone except for the referees. In those cases, the bunker should be able to hit the "common sense" button and say "look guys, you missed a pass there that is going to make the game a laughing stock if we don't step in and call it from here".

I think rugby union uses the video referee system more effectively. The onfield referees simply ask the officials in the booth whether they have seen anything that would prevent a try being awarded. The video referees are then free to ensure the integrity of the game is upheld, by making a call which the majority watching would consider to be correct.