When did offside become ok? Saints line all over the damn place. Im not one to blame refs but how can you possibly compete when you're playing a different game?

Saints centre then stood so far offside he picks up a stupid loose pass from Leulaui.

Referee did give them a lot but their forwards trampled ours and so they earned it.

Clutching at straws, I’m afraid.

Wasnt the refs fault by any stretch

No, it wasn't. Saints threw a fair few unpunished forward passes, but so did Wigan. As said, they trampled us, and the side on the front foot always gets the decisions.

I'd like to know why a red card wasn't shown for the 'tackle' on Shorrocks at the end of the game.

makes no odds red and yellow would have been the same and will still be seen by the RFL

Poor discipline AGAIN early doors coupled with sloppy, dumb play throughout. Own downfall, nowt to do with the ref.

The results are not the point though we (wire) were well and truly beaten by Salford but the refeering is a joke. Cooper got a yellow for a high tackle in our last game yet today Salford are just penalised for a high shot that spins goodwin round and stops him scoring a try.... just a penalty...



I dont get it...

well I do..... Steve Ganson is incharge of them and he was the worst ref by a country mile.

losing a game shouldnt mean we have to accept the woeful and madly inconsistent refeering

Exactly my point. At times today the saints defensive line was all over the place, some back 10, others back 5 and
the ref just ignored it after hammering us for offside in the first half. The Saints centre whos name i cant spell was stood 2 metres offside and had to turn around towards his own line to pick up a woeful stray pass from Leulaui.

This is not about winning or losing or who was the better team, its about fairness.

Utter lies. Not our fault our defensive line is quick whilst yours is amateurish. For once every ref call was bang on

because there was no red card offence, fairly simple really

If you get a chance have a look at the challenge by Peyroux,Shorrocks is in Salford royal hospital i didn't call it a tackle because it's not worthy of the term it was a blatant attack to the head

There was no attack to the head, there was no contact with the head. It was a shoulder charge no doubt (which is a penalty) but multiple reviews by the video ref saw no contact with the head, else it would have been a red card - a standard that has been in place for a number of years.

It’s never pleasant when a player gets injured, but tackles shouldn’t be penalised because of their consequences. Just because a player has whiplash (which I believe is the issue? Happy to be corrected) doesn’t mean there was an attack to the head, simply he was put in a dangerous position by foul play, which was accordingly penalised and resulted in the sin bin.

Standing 5 metres in front of the ref at the PTB is not being quick.

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.

Yes, a good and thoughtful post, phibes.