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First of all, let me take you guys back in time to April. Remember April? Seems a long time ago now doesn’t it?
The weather was getting a little bit colder, last ditch trips to the beach were being made and the footy season was getting back into full swing.
The NRL season was heating up, the Titans and Dragons actually looked good, Canberra were still bad, upsets abounded, and the season was shaping up to be the tightest and most exciting yet.
It also brought with it a stark reminder to at least one NRL fan as to why his relationship with the NRL finished on such bad terms at the end of last season.
An admission; I am a Cowboys supporter and have been since 2004. I first made the switch from union to league when I saw a little genius by the name of Matthew ‘Mango’ Bowen leave everyone in the dust on his way to the tryline again and again.
I was hooked, have followed them ever since and was understandably filthy at the end of 2013 when my team was robbed again during the first week of the finals, largely thanks to a seven-tackle set.
I cursed, complained, then got over it as the summer came and the pain faded.
However on 18th April, 2014, a Round 7 game between the Manly Sea Eagles and the North Queensland Cowboys caused all that bad blood to resurface again.
It was a cool Friday night on the Central Coast and Manly were starting to look ominous and the Cowboys were starting the season slowly.
Understandably, Manly came into the game as favourites, but as the game wore on, hope emerged of a great upset.
Key Manly players were dropping like flies, and while the Manly players defended bravely, it didn’t look like enough to stop a Cowboys side that finally looked to have clicked. Fate had other ideas however as an obviously forward pass from Brett Stewart was let go, and a Foran try was awarded despite one of the most blatant obstruction cases I have ever seen.
It was an incident referred to in the media at the time as the ‘howler of the season’.
Again, I was filthy. Out came the expected curses, claims of anti-Queensland bias, blah blah blah. But in the end, Manly flew out of the Central Coast with two competition points and the Cowboys flew out with nothing but frustration and conspiracy theories.
Now you may be thinking: “Well that’s unfortunate Ben, but mate that’s footy, and it’s the past – move on”. And if you are thinking that, then you are 100 per cent correct.
Teams get crap calls go against them all the time, and the Cowboys are not the only team able to lay claim to having been ‘robbed’ throughout the season as a result of incorrect calls.
With the NRL being such a close competition, these calls can have an enormous influence on the season as a whole, something I noticed when reading this piece on final ladder positions.
They came up with a top eight looking like this:
1) Sea Eagles – 40pts
2) Rabbitohs – 38pts
3) Roosters – 32pts
4) Warriors – 32pts
5) Panthers – 32pts
6) Storm – 32pts
7) Eels – 32pts
8) Cowboys – 30pts
Now, while I didn’t agree with every result they predicted, my own ladder prediction efforts came up with a similar result. What caught my eye with the ladder were the teams in positions one and eight – the Sea Eagles and Cowboys.
Reading this list brought to me a great sense of just what could have been. Just by reversing the result of that one game back on a cool Friday night on the Central Coast, you have a very different ladder.
History has shown us that your chances of winning the competition outside the top four are almost non-existent at best. Using Fox’s ladder that would mean that the Cowboys are really just there to make up the numbers come finals time, having to win four away games against quality opposition to walk away as 2014 champions.
However due to the close nature of the competition, had the Cowboys been the team to walk away with the two points from the Central Coast, it would have rocketed them all the way up to third – right into contention for the 2014 premiership.
Manly would have dropped to second spot, giving the minor premiership to South Sydney for the first time since 1989 along with a nice $100,000 bonus. That’s quite a change.
Of course this is delving into ‘what if’ territory – always a tricky area. The point of this article is not so much to complain of the misfortunes of my own team. As I have earlier stated – every team has to deal with crap calls.
It is part of the drama of footy.
Rather the point of this article was instead to highlight just how costly these calls can be.
I don’t want this to sound like referee bashing – god knows there are enough people to do that for me. Referees have an incredibly tough job, and they are easy targets.
They are not often commended when they put in a good performance, but you can bet that they will be admonished when they put in a bad one. When it comes down to it, referees are human and are going to make mistakes.
I just wish that that element didn’t come to have such an enormous influence on the results of a season.
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