Quote ="phibes"First off, I don’t think we lost because of the referee yesterday. What I did notice early-doors was that their first try came from field position gained from 3 penalties and our first try came on the back of field position from a penalty in the other direction. It just shows what we all know - how penalties can swing momentum and score lines in a game.
The problem with super league is that not enough is done to address inconsistencies in refereeing performances. Sometimes offside is given, at other times particularly first tackle plays, the refs don’t seem to bother. Not square at second marker is another penalty that is selectively awarded. Yesterday we were pinged for throwing the ball away, later when a saints players kicked the ball away, nothing happened.
We’re paying to watch this, the players are being paid to play and we have a standard of refereeing that sometimes looks very amateur. So what’s going on? First of all, I’d point the finger at the RFL who have never really got to grips with this problem and seem to think this crazy inconsistency is part of the game. Partly it could be to do with communication between Ganson and head coaches, and them failing to develop a shared understanding of what is and not allowed. Our PTB are a mess compared to the NRL, we have players falling down if there’s any contact with the marker and dropping the ball if there’s a hand on their arm.
One thing that I don’t get is why penalty counts are often fairly even at the end of the game. It doesn’t make sense that both teams are often as badly disciplined as one another. We know theres at least one instance of a ref asking the video ref ‘what’s the penalty count?’ during a live game. I heard that Gary Schofield put the same question to Richard Silverwood recently and he said that referees were told to ‘look after themselves’ or words to those effect. It all points to a culture within the refereeing group to give penalties selectively in order to make themselves look impartial and that could go a long way to explaining why officiating is so inconsistent even within the same game.'"
This is one of the best and fairest assessments of our refereeing problem that I've ever seen.
We all, of whatever club, frequently feel hard done to by referees - and the fact is that we're not making it up. Refereeing inconsistency can massively tilt games in the favour of one side in particular, and frequently does, while the malefactor's frantic efforts to then make it look fair by awarding a rash of late penalties to the other side when the game is already lost is pathetically transparent. If nothing else, referees should NOT be told what the penalty count is. If it bothers them so much, they should keep it themselves.
It doesn't help, of course, that our commentators don't call these things out. I heard a rumour that they were recently told to cut back back on their criticism of the officials - why, I can't imagine - but the presence in the box of Stuart Cummins as Sky's resident referee apologist (let's not forget that he was guilty of all these things too) indicates where the thinking is. It's also a joke that referees are disciplined behind closed doors. As long as the only debt they have to pay is write a letter of apology to the club in question - I know for a fact that Wigan have a roomful of them, though most other clubs probably do as well - then there is no motivation for them to clean up their act.
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