The way to stop being penalised for this seems quite straight forward to me.
When a dummy runner goes into the defensive line keep going forward beyond the defensive players and then they can't obstruct anyone (unless contact is made on the way through).
What seems to happen is that when the ball carrier goes beyond the dummy runner the dummy runner just stops and that is usually at the defensive line.
The Sutcliffe one was even worse than this, Bailey had gone through the line and then turned around and walked back into the defensive line. If Bailey had just stopped (or continued to go forward) and not walked back towards his own players it wouldn't have been an obstruction.

Perhaps. I wouldn't put money on it though.

5 years previously 9 years were Amateurs up to conference premier.
You see the role of Referee is much demonised by the great majority but at the end of the day there are 34 players and 1 official on the pitch (excluding touch judges that are not always present) over 80 minutes and only 1 is absolutely essential hence refereeing includes coaching, whether you like or accept it or not.

or we get high quality refs, or even trust the ones we have to be capable of knowing the difference between obstruction and Sutcliffe situation.

Bailey couldnt disappear, he was yards away from Sutcliffe, it wasn't obstruction. Im not sure having dummy runners just carry on running away from the play like Forrest Gump is going to improve the game all that much.

I think some on here would have loved it if Bailey did disappear


What he should have done is stopped and not headed back towards his own line and therefore into the defensive line.
Dummy runners need to continue for three strides not keep running like Forrest Gump.
Until the obstruction rule is changed or interpreted differently it is up to the players to work out how to not get penalised for it, both the dummy runners and the guy with the ball.
This has nothing to do with decent referees it looks fairly obvious to me how the rule is being interpreted by the refs and it appears to be consistent to.
I believe that the Sutcliffe "incident" was obstruction as it hasn't got anything to do with how close the player with the ball is to the player obstructing it is all to do with how the player without the ball is impacting the defence.
Bailey moved and stood in the defensive line and therefore got in the way of defensive players so it was an obstruction.

i dont agree that the defensive line simply own the space ahead of the ball carrier, they are allowed to impact the defense. In fact thats why Dummy Runners exist. There is a big difference between a blocker creating a gap, and a dummy runner and in 99% of cases it is very obvious.

Bailey didnt move and stand in the defensive line there was barely a line to start with at that point. You say he only has to carry on running for three strides but he was more than three strides ahead of Sutcliffe.

If as you say how far away Bailey was from Sutcliffe was irrelevant. then every dummy runner removes an entire side of the field from play. Bailey was stood near the posts, by what you are saying the Right hand side of that field was out of play for Sutcliffe.

That is sop to poor defence. Sutcliffe scored because of poor defence, there was a huge gaping hole in Leighs defence. They were rewarded with a penalty because earlier Bailey had run a dummy line.

The entire reason for this is that the referees/disciplinary want to say beyond doubt every decision is correct. So they put this stupid checklists in place where referees tick things off to come to a decision, removing all judgement from them.

Thats why we have such a problem with offside, because there are shades of grey, there situations where 50% would say obstruction, 50% wouldnt. To remove that they changed the criteria to judgements of facts and ended up getting decisions for obstruction which meet those criteria but arent what anyone would recognise as obstruction (i.e someone actually being obstructed from play)

Its also how we ended up with the idiotic charge down decision. We know what a charge down is, you know what one is when you see it, i do, fans of the game do, and refs do. 99% of the time there is no problem, Very rarely we get border line decisions. To remove that shade of grey it becomes a judgement of fact. Was the ball rising. If it was, charge down. Whilst this may remove the grey area. It created a stupid situation where a player making no attempt to charge down, is judged to have charged down because the ball is rising.

It is an attempt to remove 'game sense' from the referees and it has given us worse officiating.