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With some extra time on my hands last weekend I decided to do an academic study for submission to the The Roar. I was determined to prove my hypothesis on one aspect of rugby league.
To ensure I had a valid sample size I locked myself away in a small dark room, fuelled myself with caffeine and pizza Shapes, and watched replays of every top-flight match from 1908 to 2014.
Excitedly, I bought myself a box of pens and six notebooks to record every instance of the phenomenon, but sadly, as I emerged bleary eyed from my rugby league marathon I hadn’t gone as far as taking the cap off one pen.
So what was I measuring that would require such an extensive study? I wanted to see how many times a referee changed their mind on a decision after being challenged by a player.
The answer, of course, is a big fat duck egg, or as a friend of mine would say, a brontosaurus egg.
How could this be? I was sure that the way players carry on during matches there must have been thousands of examples. But “sir, I definitely didn’t knock the ball on”, was never met with “oh really? Sorry, my mistake, you can keep the ball”.
And even more surprising was the fact that 27 players rushing towards the referee arguing the point still didn’t make them change their mind.
So why do they do it? Why expend that amount of energy and effort on such a futile exercise? As a coach once told me, worry about what you can control in a game.
That’s not to say that referees don’t influence matches of rugby league. Students of sport and real academic studies would know that there is an almost consistent 55 per cent winning rate for home teams in almost all documented professional sports. Many academics have studied this phenomenon, and each and every study has shown that it’s not the travel or interrupted preparations, in fact teams play no differently away than they do at home.
Instead the bias is attributed to referee decisions influenced by the social pressure felt by the referee from the home crowd. Whether its calling a strike, awarding injury time or blowing penalties, home teams receive the rub of the green more often than not. In fact, if you’ve ever been unsure about attending a match it’s also proven that the larger the crowd and the higher percentage of home fans, the larger the bias is.
At the start of the season the NRL announced that referees would only speak to players during breaks, mostly in response to serial pests like Michael Ennis and Jamie Lyon who spend more time arguing with referees than actually playing the game. This seemed to work quite well, although after a few weeks the rule seemed to have been forgotten and not policed, just like the third man in below the knees.
But what worries me is that rugby league is slowly becoming more like football, where any disagreement in a decision is not only argued, but players rush from all points of the field to put in their two cents. Not only is it a bad look for the sport, but it sends the wrong message to junior players who could make life even tougher for referees at lower levels.
So to all NRL players, worry about your game and let the referee do his job. Because in the end, fans booing for an offside penalty will have more influence than you anyway.
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