It can't end well. Crunch: Roosters forward Sam Moa is tackled by the St George Illawarra Dragons at Allianz Stadium. Credit:Matt King The Bunker's fortunes this season run parallel to those of Wests Tigers. The first two weeks, we thought they were the bee's knees. Now? Not so much. Any time you define an offence by the actions of the victim, you invite entrapment. If my falling in a heap on the street makes you guilty of assault, and I don't like you, I'm going to do a lot of falling over (Particularly if you and I are in competition and run the only two Madagascar-themed cigar emporiums in the area). This is actually more the case with an issue raised by Robinson: players staying down to entice the bunker to have a look. If you create an incentive for doing so, it will happen.

Pretty simple equation, that. A new Australian representative: Semi Radradra. Credit:Cameron Spencer But you can't allow foul play to go unpunished. The court of public opinion watching via the magic flickering light box won't allow it. You can't get coaches to stop running block plays because you'll have a harder time defining block plays than we are currently having with obstruction. The years ahead for rugby league will look like a Three Stooges movie, only in colour with better abs. Because brutal body contact sport and modern life are incompatible. Another big story this week was Semi Radradra being picked by Australia.

Like obstruction and staying on the ground, this is an antiquated universe of "caps" and "tours" and "representation" trying to deal with a modern world in which these notions are about as relevant as pantaloons. We don't go on tours anymore because one game on the magic light box earns more. And how do we apply the current paradigm to a set of rules drawn up when Fiji was the stuff of etching by Joseph Banks? It doesn't work. The argument against allowing Origin players to represent other countries, the reason championed by NSW and Queensland, is that "you have to be Australian to represent an Australian state". But this definition of "Australian" is from the old days. Before the bunker. When obstruction was still a shepherd. People do not have unambiguous self-image anymore. They can feel a Queenslander first and a Samoan second, or identify with any number of global communities more emotionally than they feel connected to their nationality. You hold up a qualification hoop and someone will jump though it eventually. International sport is really just a big global club competition now, with brazen recruitment and financial incentives. They are teams to make, not countries to represent. People have legal rights. If they can fight and vote for a country, they (or their solicitor) will argue they can represent it at the World Pole Sports Championships.

Yes, I'd like rugby league to try to skip the queue a little by the top countries artificially propping up their rivals for the greater good. But coaches need wins. Players need pay cheques. Concussion victims need analysing. Incidents need reviewing. Jobs need justifying. Generally speaking, bills need paying. Brutal body contact sports are incompatible with modern life and these sports will pay an ever increasing ransom to keep modern life at bay. With each passing year they'll pay more and more to litigants. They'll eradicate every hint of violence. They'll fail utterly to juggle club v country and everything will come down to weight of money. They'll end up watched by the rich and played by the poor. The biggest of them will eat the smallest. And eventually, brutal body contact sports will cease to exit.