IT'S a rugby league maxim which will hopefully soon go the way of hookers winning scrums, inside and outside centres and the KB Cup.

And after Saturday night's second preliminary final at ANZ Stadium we heard it at least twice: "what happens on the field stays on the field."

In case you missed it, St George Illawarra hooker Dean Young appeared to drop the forearm into the face of opposite Robbie Farah as Young attempted to score a try in the 22nd minute of the Dragons' nerve-racking 13-12 win.

The two then became entangled on the ground and Farah later claimed to referee Ben Cummins that Young had called him "a f****** wog".

Cummins twice asked Farah if he wanted to lodge a formal complaint. He said he did not. After the match, both Farah and Young trotted out the "what happens....'' cliché.

There are two issues here: one is a 21st-century athlete thinking he can put a verbal genie back in a bottle despite the cameras and microphones following his every move and word.

The second is whether "f****** wog" is a racial slur.

The NRL match review committee will on Sunday examine video to see if Young's elbow struck Farah's melon and it will also check match audio to see if the abuse was picked up.

Chief match reviewer Greg McCallum will then - almost certainly - ring Farah and ask him what happened. Farah says he won't comment.

But just as Farah had an angry exchange with a Twitter user a couple of weeks ago and then blamed the press for writing about it, his call for the media to report on positive things this week and ignore this incident has come long, long, after the horse bolted.

And it's him who opened the gate.

NRL players, listen up. If you're in the 14 teams whose seasons are over, put down your beers for a sec. NOTHING that happens on the field has had any guarantee of staying there for at least a decade. You should be grateful your stay in the Big Brother household only lasts for 80 minutes each week.

Some overseas athletes are there 24-7. You are being paid as objects of amusement for the public and thinking you can keep secrets with 71,212 people watching from close proximity is rather naive, don't you think?

Now, the tricky thing about racial vilification is that you can't be offended on behalf of someone else. So if Robbie doesn't proceed with a complaint, the matter may  well go nowhere.

But the stain of the affair - which Robbie clearly understands - will remain.

I would say that if Dean Young did call Robbie Farah a "f****** wog", it's not something that reflects that well on Dean or his club. They are not the sort of epithets that fly around these days.

It's just a shame that former ABC radio round-the-grounds man Lex Marinos, who was called a wog on television at least five times a week in his days as an actor on Kingswood Country, was not on hand last night to address the issue.

I was raised in an era when it was a common term but it was never complimentary. I'll hand it over to you, esteemed reader: should ‘wog' count as racial vilification?

Best answer gets one of Ted Bulpit's cans of KB - without having to leave any money on the fridge.