Wests’ Sezer can’t promise end to hip-drop tackles

Aidan Sezer believes NRL players sometimes have no alternative but to make hip-drop tackles, as Wests Tigers’ ill-disciplined season threatens to make history.

The Tigers have lost a player to the sin bin 15 times this year – the equal-second-largest tally for the statistic since the rule’s introduction in 1981.

Veteran playmaker Sezer accounts for two of those sin-binnings, having laid hip-drop tackles that resulted in six games worth of suspensions.

A type of illegal tackle where the ball carrier’s leg becomes crushed under the defender’s hip, the hip-drop tackle had barely entered the NRL vernacular when Sezer left for a four-year stint in England from 2020.

But this season Sezer has returned to a game that is faster than ever, with players mastering the six-again rule introduced in 2020.

Sezer admitted his struggles to adjust to the game’s pace may have been to blame for getting his tackle technique wrong on occasions this season.

“For sure,” he told AAP as he prepared to return from suspension against Newcastle.

“I don’t go out and try to do it, I don’t think any player that’s been done for hip drops this year intentionally does it.

“(But) what’s the alternative? I sort of don’t know what the alternative is if you get on the side of someone when you’re trying to bring them down.

“That’s the way we’ve been taught since we were kids, is to use momentum on the bigger blocks to take them down.

“If someone can explain to the players what the alternative is, then there might be a solution. Until then, we’re going to see players getting in trouble for it.”

With four games left in the Tigers’ campaign, a frustrated Sezer feels unable to promise he won’t be charged by the match review committee for a sixth time this season.

“I can’t make any guarantees I won’t do it again,” he said.

“I’ll do my best to avoid it because I obviously don’t want to be sitting on the sidelines, getting un-binned in games obviously lets the team down.”

Benji Marshall’s side is on track to pass the sin bin record set by 1991’s Balmain Tigers (17), given they average three players sin-binned every four matches this season.

Of the Tigers’ 15 sin-binnings, only seven were for illegal tackles, the remaining eight coming from professional fouls, repeated infringements or verbal dissent.

While Sezer could understand tackles going wrong, he said the Tigers had to be accountable for sin-binnings that came from self-inflicted pressure.

“A lot of it is letting ourselves down,” he said.

“We’re scrambling and boys are obviously having to come up with plays to slow the play down and not concede tries and things like that.

“The fabric of the game is, is about running harder, tackling harder and doing everything with intensity and sometimes you get it wrong, sometimes you get it right (in tackles).

“But a lot of it has been our own doing and we need to hold ourselves accountable for it.”