Referee Ben Cummins sends David Fa'alogo to the bin. AAP Image/Action Photographics/Colin Whelan
It’s normally about the third question asked of a losing coach in the post match press conference: “What did you make of the referee’s performance?” Sometimes the journalists strike gold, as a coach blows his top and the newspapers can then follow it up with a call to David Gallop to ask whether that warrants a $10,000 fine.
If they’re really lucky, we can get a sermon from an editor about the importance of obeying the referee’s decision.
More often than not, though, an already cranky coach will say: “I don’t like commenting on those things”, with some veiled reference to not wanting to incur a fine.
Or you might get, “you guys saw it, what did you think”, or the diplomatic, “we need to work on our own performance.”
But is there now a role to quiz the referee in a post match interview?
We certainly hear enough of them of during the game. Few seem to be shrinking violets, and lord knows there seems to be enough on the field that one could take up some press duties following a match.
I don’t think we want a weekly flogging on television, whereby a referee gets a TV shoved in his face and as a frame by frame replay shows him the error of his ways, a fan can scream “SEE! SEE!” in his ear.
Or maybe …
So it would need to be handled well. But it could also be an improvement to the Robert Finch story on Tuesday’s saying, “blah blah got it wrong and has been demoted”.
I’m not entirely sure myself, but I do know that the current system, whereby journalists fish for the ‘OPSM’ style comments, is getting pretty tired and something could be done to spice it up.
If a refereeing decision is the talking point, why not quiz a ref after a game? The biggest danger might be getting crushed by Bill Harrigan on his way to get in front of the camera.
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