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In 1997, the video referee was introduced in both the ARL and Super League competitions to help referees when they weren’t sure if a try was scored.
Could we have imagined back then that within 18 years we would tie ourselves in so many intellectual knots that that the video referee can no longer help a referee who is unsure if a try is scored?
Instead, we have second-guessed ourselves in the face of sustained, clichéd, predictable criticism to such an extent that the referee who doesn’t know if a try was scored must pretend he does know.
And – here’s the kicker – that is exactly what match officials did anyway for 101 years to 1996 anyway!
Colleague Malcolm Knox was right on Saturday when he wrote that rugby league’s concussion problem is really that the game itself is concussed.
At Monday Night Football, I told anyone who would listen about my disdain for the illogical process that requires an on-field official to make it up if he doesn’t know if a try was scored. He lies to the video referee about an opinion he does not have, and then the video referee has to prove his lie incorrect.
The actual truth – as is the case in so much of our officiating and in the game at large – has been relegated to a side issue.
The majority of my colleagues disagree with me. And a couple of them, including The Australian‘s Stuart Honeysett, asked coaches Ivan Cleary and Trent Robinson what they thought following Sydney Roosters’ 20-12 win over Penrith.
It was a topic of interest specifically because Panther Dallin Watene-Zelezniak had what looked like a fair try chalked off after it was sent upstairs as a ‘no try’.
The coaches liked the system – although, tellingly, Cleary would rather have no video referee at all. This is what happens to all of us when we get too close to our subject – we obsess about nuances and personalities and perceptions and lose sight of simple logic.
When it comes to both sides of the refereeing fence in the NRL – the whistlers and the clubs – they are like beaten dogs who don’t know what is good and what is bad anymore because they never get a treat either way.
They stumble around in the dark for answers that satisfy the demands of semantics but do not work in the real world.
When you introduce processes that don’t observe simple logic – “I don’t know if that was a try or not, please help me” is logical – it doesn’t matter if everyone supports it and it makes them feel better because it won’t work.
And decisions like the Watene-Zelezniak one will happen as a complete inevitability.
I don’t care about referees’ confidence. I don’t care about selling things to the coaches. I don’t care about processes or KPIs or speeding the game up or slowing it down or perceptions in the media.
I care about match officials trying to get it right as often as possible, according to the Laws of the Game and using whatever aids are at our disposal to achieve that.
I’d like to see the referees’ administration forget everything else. Everything.
Get back to everyone being straight up with each other. If the rule book is outdated, if it needs a more detailed definition of a knock-on or a try, then make it bigger.
Forget interpretations, just officiate based on one premise: were the rules observed, or weren’t they? And judge the referees’ bosses purely on performance according to that criteria, not how they “manage stakeholders”.
Nothing else matters.
***
Recent columns have had some big hitting readers with the NRL’s head of football Todd Greenberg retweeting the one about the League taking over junior development and Robinson giving me some feedback about last week’s offering.
In it, I said that rugby league is a brutal game despite rule changes and the pressure between the changing face of society and what is essentially a Victorian era sport will increase in the years ahead.
While not disagreeing with that premise, Trent didn’t think his quote from last week on the radio – “We want to leave some of them on the ground” – was reflective of any brutality.
Yes, Adam Reynolds was left on the ground in an accident but Trent said “leaving people on the ground” was just about quick play-the-balls, not wounded opposition.
He wasn’t blowing up about the story and didn’t ask that I wrote anything but I thought it worth recording here to give you as complete a picture as possible on a complex issue.