There were almost 30 penalties given away by Huddersfield Giants and St Helens in Saints' 18-10 win at the Galpharm Stadium last Sunday. In any normal season, one would expect a rash of penalties as players dial back in to week-in week-out football - but this felt different.

The number of players pulled up for obstructions was alarming. It appears to be Red Hall's new dictate to referees to clamp down on it, but at times players were passing behind dummy runners by a good seven or eight metres and being pulled for it. It reduced the game to a stop-start affair.

The big problem is that this has been coming. Towards the end of the 2006 season, there was a marked rise in penalty counts across the board and the current zero-tolerance approach to obstruction will exacerbate this. If I wanted to watch a referee with nary a chance to take the whistle out of his mouth and penalties being booted from all angles, I'd go and watch Rugby Union. This isn't the sport that I grew up watching and came to love.

This reduced level of entertainment coincides with rising ticket prices. The cheapest adult ticket at the Galpharm is £18.50, which is starting to get towards big money. And this is Huddersfield! OK, nice stadium, but for a club with a notoriously low average attendance and a fair-to-middling team, it begins to look ridiculous.

You can draw parallels to what happened with football, but football has that universal appeal that every other sport simply doesn't have. It can get away with high prices and low entertainment levels because there's a massive supply of people willing and actively wanting to pay - a luxury that Rugby League simply does not have. The Rugby League supporter can be a massively fickle animal and people will not pay through the nose to watch a watered-down version of the game.

Meanwhile in the National Leagues, teams are set to be awarded league points for losing games - as long as it's not by too much. The idea is to encourage teams to keep giving their all for the whole of the game. Anyone who thinks the Rugby League professional ever goes out with the intention of not giving it everything clearly hasn't met anyone who has played the game for a living. Giving rewards for failure is not how this sport has operated and there doesn't appear a clear reason for changing this now.