For me, both incidents were worthy of a yellow card. Ah van you can see wasn't deliberate or malicious i don't believe so yellow would of been fair. Same with smith, petulant but a sending off? really? not for me. I can see why ah van did get a red however in the laws of the game, but interpretation is by individual i guess.
It's a sad indication of the psyche of the rugby league supporter at the moment as a general consensus is to just bag the ref. All I saw on twitter last night was new era, same refs bla bla bla and then 7 pages of moaning about how bad refs are. We should be focusing on what an excellent game it was, a great skill level we had and great fightback, yet people are only interested in moaning about the ref. Why has rugby league become so cynical?
People are getting incredulous at the Refs already, 1 game in. Give it a rest man and enjoy the game. As seen by this thread the events are interpreted differently all the time, which was what happened last night. If the Ref misses a knock on, foot in touch etc and carries on they should be accountable but for the making split second opinion based decisions there has to be understanding and reasoning, which it seems for most RL fans blind outrage has overtaken.
It has snowballed to the point that people genuinely believe in a red hall conspiracy, or that the reason their team lost was because of the ref. Forget about the missed tackles, dropped balls and stupid players making bad decisions - it's the ref's fault. It's embarrassing.
PS - who keep's feeding Joel Tomkins skittles.