Whether you are a Wigan, Saints or any other fan watching a replay of today's game I ask one simple question: how many times does Bentham actually LOOK left and right to check for offside?

In the first half I counted NINE consecutive possessions (Wigan & Saints) where he didn't look once. I've never seen anything like it in years.

Bentham= Winker

I also wondered how many more penalties Wigan would have to give away on their own line before someone would have walked. That wound me up a lot!

The big ginger lad (jack Hughes?) should have had a spell in the bin for persistant pens.

It's very rare that I have a go at a referee. After all it is a very difficult role. But today's performance was bordering on the surreal. Tackle after tackle after tackle I continued to watch him and time after time after time he made no effort whatsoever to look down the defensive line. His head never moved once.

At first I thought he must be looking out of the corner of his eyes but this couldn't be true as on numerous occasions players were stood three to four yards offside whilst no more than a few feet away from him.

He simply wasn't looking. Astonishing.

I agree with that, as he was the main culprit. It just wound me up how it took about 5 or 6 penalties I think before Bentham had a word with Finch.

It was 3 IIRC before he spoke to Finch.

Touch Judges should have been looking for it as well, but they didn't really do anything the whole game, other than give 2 penalties involving Hock that were both wrong IMO. (One went our way, the other didn't, you could say they cancelled each other out)

On the whole, not the best refereeing performance of the season, but by no means the worst.

He had a far greater influence on the game than he should have done.

As has been mentioned his refusal to pull a yellow out for persistent fouling during that spell of pressure ultimately decided the game.

His general performance was also very strange, with rules such as offside and forward passes from the ruck completely ignored.

You have to credit Wigan both for their resilience and their quality near our line but the referee had a major influence on the outcome. As for us losing Lomax was a disruption too far and the forwards didn't match their grit.

I was surprised that Hughes wasn't binned. It was clearly a professional foul and stopped Roby scoring a certain try.

I've said for years that the touchjudge should officiate the offside at the PTB. The ref would then be able to focus solely on the tackle & ruck without thinking, "I have to run back quick to set the defensive line offside". Also, only having to look one way across a line, the TJ could see much more easily whether there were any transgressors.

No arguments here. Bentham is truly shocking when teams are defending close to the line. He has a habit of turning to face one touchline which allows players behind him to walk yards offside and never been seen.

Today was a total fiasco. I've never seen a defensive line managed so ineptly.

he didn't give penaltys for offside? :S your mental what do you think the 4 in a row was for? majority of you probably didn't watch on the telly hes wasn't that bad.

In English please; not gibberish.

another one proven wrong attacks my puncuation. in plain simple english stop talking crap.

he give more than one pen for offside and you know it.

You idiot; it is because he gave four consecutive penalties without taking any action the Saints fans are complaining. There should have been a yellow card.

wiginers = nitwits.

The standard of refereeing in SL is a joke.

Having said that, I had the misfortune of sitting in your main stand today and had to listen to Saints fans whinging about not getting the rub of the green from the referees, cheating Wigan etc etc

They went very quiet when I pointed to the big screen, which appeared to show Soliola failed to ground the ball for his "try".... an incident which the referee felt he didn't need the VR's help with...

Pap

He gave 3 penalties in a row for off side, then called finch out to warn him about off sides.

The next penalty was not for off side.

The next time we got the ball, he decided off sides weren't important anymore and didn't even look at your line.

What made it worse was that he sin-binned Shenton for a similar professional foul

Thought he did an excellent job. As it was a tv game his role is only to make sure there's only one try in it up to the 65 minute mark to keep the viewing figures up

Did well when he gave us all those pens and the Soliola non try to get us back to 12-10, must have seemed a very exciting game on sky at that stage

Appalling and inconsistent standards of refereeing are killing the game at the moment and that has to have been the worst performance I've ever seen. Even Holdsworth in his evil prime would have given[i some [/idodgy decisions our way too to try and make it look overall like basic incompetence instead of plain out and out cheating, but the **** in the middle yesterday couldn't be d to even make it appear even handed. It's hard to not believe in conspiracy theories after Wellens' ban and then that farago of officialdom. I honestly can't see me ever forking out to watch a game that Bent-One refs again as **** knows the result will be decided in advance after all. We probably wouldn't have been quite good enough to win the game whatever with all the bodies we were missing (and how funny is RLFans' headline report touting Wigan's magnificent "injury crippled win" anyway

) and Lomax going off so early, but that stinking scumbag made completely sure of it. Constantly ignored offsides, ignored forward passes, ignored spear tackle (wasn't the excuse given for Wellens' and LaFrank's conveniently timed bans the desire by RL to clamp down hard on that kind of thing?), ignored persistent professional fouling, phantom Wigan penalties whenever they needed them.... And the **** will be allowed to just run back onto the field and screw some other poor team over just the same next week with no sanction being applied again whatsoever. Words just fail me right now. Just what is the point in even trying to get excited about watching a sport so intent on willfully destroying itself and it's spectacle and making itself such a laughing stock in so many different ways anyway?

Then again it doesn't really mean anything because it was just a meaningless friendly.

In the 2nd half Bentham gave consecutive penalties to Saints on a number of occasions to try and help you back into the game, but it was to no avail. At 12-10, Saints had a number of great opportunities to take the lead, but Wigan's defense stood up. A number of incidents in Saints favour could have been questioned too, Hughes no Try? Soliola knocking on? Goulding Penalty Try?

Yes, by spear-tackling and persistent professional fouling, both of which were unpunished by the red and yellow cards that they should have received respectively and that would almost certainly have lead to us going on to winning the game handily. Those "consecutive penalties" we were "gifted" by your oh so benevolent referee deserved a card, one should have been handed out under the laws of the game and none was forthcoming. This basic and simple fact cannot be glossed over.

The disallowed/allowed tries were down to the video ref, not the Bent-One, so he cannot be credited with levelling the scores up on those. For me they were both tries - I hate the rule on dropped balls during the act of putting the ball down being OK so long as the player is in some kind of contact with it until grounding, but it is the current law and the try was good as a result of it. I was 150 yards away from both the screen and move for the disallowed Piedown and I genuinely couldn't tell although it would indeed have taken some doing for the ball not to have been grounded at some point in all that tumbling.

The penalty try should have been given all the way (although the build-up looked a mile forward to me at the time), but they pretty much don't exist in our game anymore for some bizarre reason so there's no way any referee would have given one - again you can't credit Bent-One for that.

Bent-One gave us nothing all game we didn't deserve. You got all the help you needed from the **** whenever you needed it. The case for the defence rests.

It is the week to week changes in the rules that gets me.

Against Catalan we got murdered for not being square and against Warrington and Bradford both sides got penalised for any tackle near the head. Yet in that game Bentham did not seem to both with either rule at all.

I have not seen the replay of Hocks spear tackle yet but from what I remember seeing live it seemed pretty similar to what got Bryn Hargreaves sent off against Leeds.

As a fan it is hard to know what rules you are playing to week to week. As a coach it must make preparing for a match near impossible.