going to give credit where its due..when i seen we were having him as ref i thought oh no thats us screwed,but no he reffed the game well,there was the odd blunder but no ones perfect..he got important decisions right and im glad he wasnt the reason we lost...unlike the baffoon that reffed sts and cats..so it should be mr bentham that gets the nod for the grand final..and no im not drunk..

Thought he'd made some errors live at the ground but after watching it back he got all the big calls right.

I'd imagine he'll get the gig next week on the back of that.

Well if he does, the title is Wigan's.
Because they can carry on holding down, fiddling about and general thuggery and gamesmanship.
Beware the Saints.

The best thing that Saints can do is copy it, cos Bentham is like Nelson in his effort to let the game flow. It might even out.

I was confused with the decision where what looked like a Wigan player dropped the ball in a tackle , the ball was then played by another Wigan player & eventually Wigan touched the ball down over our line. The ref then came back for a scrum where the ball was dropped & awarded the put in to Wigan. My problem is that either it should have been us to feed the scrum or Wigan had a perfectly good try disallowed. Could someone please enlighten me as i have only seen the incident once ,live and at distance.

The ball was slapped out of the Wigan player's hands by Atkins, so it was a Wire knock on but a free play. Wigan went on touch the ball down but after a forward pass, so back to the beginning of the free play and a scrum to Wigan. Was actually a really good decision.

Thank you, now i understand & a rare moment when a forward pass is called !

Warrington fought fire with fire on the holding down front last night. I've not seen a team mess about at the play the ball as much against us this season.

I've no issues with that by the way. All teams push it as far as they can and we do that more then most but it was at best 50/50 last night.

Ah yes. It's appalling that only Wigan ever hold down, fiddle about and offer a bit of the rough stuff in the middle. Every one else plays to the rules to the letter can should be commended for their chivalry.

Holding down and gamesmanship, ok which other SL team doesn’t do either? and just don’t say that Wigan are the worst, the first to do it, or the only ones that get away with it. Just answer the question!
Wigan are thugs! Another new one, who on the Wigan side was the thug last night? and who was the player who had to leave the field with a gash under his swollen eye caused by an elbow in the face, not the first Wigan player to have a bad eye injury caused by a Warrington player, yet I don’t call Warrington players thugs, and by the way I don’t think MM injury was intentional last night. Wire gave it everything last night and fair play to them, but I’d say that Wigan just deserved the win.

Don't understand how people think it is just Wigan that hold down, Huddersfield have been doing it for years. In the past I've seen Chris Nero attempt a McDonalds maze game during his time in the ruck.

And he got it wrong.

Not going in to it in great depth but the worst culprit and most obvious is Farrel , how he does not get penalised more often i will never know

Well a few instances where Bentham remained inactive last night, all to Warrington's detriment, were :-
The ball was being shifted out to the left by Wire in the first half and O'Brien (IIRC) who was not even the receiver but was going to be the one after that got clattered over.

Tomkins in the act of getting off straddled an attacking Wire player at a time when Wire were threatening the line.

Farrell serially hung on to the point of being yellow carded.

No doubt Wigan had there own examples, but Bentham did nothing.

Only slight gripe I'd have over Bentham last night was how Tony Clubb doesn't get sin-binned for simply being unable to tackle properly.....



One head tackle is careless and fair enough, but to carry out the same offence in the very next play is taking the p!$s - Bentham should have binned him immediately, as surely that is what the sin bin is there for, so as to punish players who are obviously suffering from a lack of discipline.

At the very least, in a situation like that, a referee should be able to make the offender be removed from the pitch, using up one of his side's interchanges.

Agreed ...
The point being that if the ref does NOWT then the message given out is 'carry on infringing'..
Also there is a tendency nowadays for the ref to 'have a word' with players after unpunished misdemeanours when he should be penalising and attempting to stamp them out.
Pants really ...it smacks of 'owt for a quiet life'.

No complaints from me about the refereeing aside from the Wigan players continually striking out at the markers when playing the ball. Sarginson and Clubb the worst offenders.

I think 'free play'is a nonsense rule and the game was settled off the back of one. A real shame I thought.

Regards letting a game flow, blow up like mad in the first few games of the season, then games will flow when people stop p*ss*ng about and they know the boundaries.

They do that already and it just ruins the 1st month of rugby and doesn't work. How about people just get better on the ground and speed up the ruck and not just the play of the ball like they do in the NRL, the actual wrestling doesn't happen any less just the players are much quicker.