Quote ="WARRIORCRAIG"In-touch, grounding and offside are black and white decisions, the onfield ref may not have been in the correct position to see it, send it upstairs, one or two looks at it then a decision is made. Other stuff where there is an obvious break in play like double movement, ball out on full etc could still be clarified because again they are black and white.
The issue with stuff like forward passes and obstruction is they are open to interpretation. Slowing it down and watching a frame-by-frame replay of where a player caught a ball from 3 or 4 different angles time and time again is what people are getting fed up with. The onfield ref needs to make a decision about whether or not there was an impedance that prevented someone from making a tackle. To have a situation where coaches are openly saying they are getting their team to play in a different way when games are televised is ridiculous.'"
How is that any different to playing the ref? It's standard practice to change your game if you know the ref is lax on offside or lying on for example. Always has been. Players are coached to try and steel a meter and if that works try for two! If you know the presence of a video ref means something for certain decisions then you'd be daft not to accommodate this in the same way. If there is an issue on how the video ref is doing the job so it results in incorrect decisions due to slow motion then change it.
What I don't see is how stopping them ruling on certain issues is going to avoid the problem of it being possible for replays to show blatant reasons for a try not to stand and the only reason it does is the video ref can't rule on it.
Quote I'm sure someone will come on and reply that the interpretation of the obstruction rule the refs are enforcing is correct and I have no issue with that, what I do have an issue with is that it's not being enforced consistently. The whole caught on the inside/outside shoulder ruling only gets pulled up if it leads to a try in a televised game. You could do the same play 4 times and then score off the 5th and only that one would be punished. Similarly you could run that play, get tackled millimetres short then the dummy half could barge over and it would be fine. The only way to overcome this inconsistency is to make it an onfield decision only.'"
There were several instances of the new interpretation of the obstruction rule bringing play to a halt last night without the video ref being there. At least twice Widnes got pulled up for it in the 2nd half and I am sure we did once. I saw nothing wrong with any of them but that is not the point. No video ref and we still got more penalties for obstruction in the game than we would have last season. The issue here is not the video ref but this new interpretation of the rule. As to inconsistency that has been a gripe for as long as I can remember.
