AN almost identical shoulder charge from Waqa Blake earlier in the season didn’t earn a charge, so why is Billy Slater on the verge of being rubbed out of the grand final in his last season?

That’s a question that was doing the rounds on Monday.

And while the footage of Blake smashing David Fusitu’a over the sideline would be a wonderful piece of evidence for the Slater team, Paul Kent has revealed why it won’t be used.

“Let’s go to the Waqa Blake tackle earlier in the year where he appeared to do a very similar tackle to what Billy Slater did the other night,” he began.

“Now Waqa Blake didn’t get charged for that and if you watch this there are a lot of similarities between what Billy did and what he did.

“Melbourne under the judicial rules are not allowed to use any tackle that has not resulted in a charge. So that tackle there that people are sending around saying, ‘This is why Billy should get off, because Waqa Blake got no charge’, it’s irrelevant, it’s inadmissable as part of the evidence.”

Despite this, Kent still believes there is sufficient evidence to overturn Slater’s suspension.

“Now what is in Billy’s favour, if we look at the tackle and break down the front-on vision where he’s first coming across and we can see him make his first contact here with Sosaia Feki... that’s his right arm that’s in contact with Feki’s right arm, and you can still see a gap between Billy’s shoulder and Sosaia Feki’s body,” he said on NRL 360.

“So that shows you that the first contact was the hand. Billy’s hand makes the first contact with Sosaia Feki. Now let me take you to what the NRL did last year when they beefed up the charges of the shoulder charge and rewrote the rule.

“The new rule says this, ‘As part of a change to the judiciary and match review system, a player will be charged if a) the contact is forceful, and there’s no doubt it was, but b) and this is the important bit, the player did not use, or attempt to use, his arms (including his hands) to tackle or otherwise take hold of the opposing player.

“Now we see in that still there of that tackle, Billy has attempted to use his hands.”

He also said Slater’s argument after the match that he was expecting Feki to step inside him, would hold him in good stead.

“So then you’re following the rest of the tackle and what happened after that,” he continued.

“If he argues that he was anticipating Feki to step inside him and essentially he got the tackle wrong and that there was a collision at the end of it rather than trying to (shoulder) charge him, and that was the unavoidable action that he took with the hand bracing himself for the collision, I think with a sympathetic judiciary he can get away with it.”