the flying biscuit wrote:
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
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.