There is one man, and one man only, that both Geoff Carr and Ross Livermore should be calling for come Origin game one. That man is Richard Silverwood. Ah… who?
Cast your minds back to the Kangaroos vs. Kiwis test of earlier this month.
In a fairly patchy game where New Zealand dropped more ball than the Lotto girl, one man’s performance was so complete he even stopped Phil Gould frothing about Benji Marshall for a minute and a half.
I am of course talking about the referee of the game, a non-descript balding Englishman who put the other 26 blokes on the field to shame with his quick decision making and calm in the heat of the battle.
Like an MI6 agent from the cold war era, Richard ‘Long John’ Silverwood infiltrated the defences of rugby league’s Southern power block, executed his mission objectives and was back on a plane to Dewsbury with a martini and a flirty stewardess before Jamal Idris had even chosen what colour Powerade he wanted.
Silverwood had achieved the pinnacle of officialdom, he had become invisible.
That may sound a bit underwhelming for any budding referees out there but it works both ways.
Having occasionally dabbled in the dark arts of officialdom I can attest to the fact that when the crowd stops cheering the player and starts jeering the whistleblower things can get uglier than George Rose getting a bikini wax.
My own reffing horror story involves the sister of a large, scary, prominent NRL first grader in a schoolgirls match who I was required to send from the field (to the crowd’s eternal disappointment) after she had all but disembowelled five players from the opposition.
Another involves penalising the young son of a former international player and now first grade coach for a textbook NRL tackle that was outlawed in his particular age group, only to feel an irate six-foot plus shadow suddenly appear next to me on the sideline.
Finally there’s the repeated embarrassment of having to enter a psyched-up dressing sheds full of blokes ready to bite off their own hands to deliver a squeaky “two minutes guys, two minutes” pre match.
If invisibility is the highest plane of umpire enlightenment then consistency is its cornerstone.
Most spectators and players will take solace in a dodgy decision if it breaks both ways, much the same way the ref will accept criticism if it is warranted and objective.
An interesting analysis of this uneasy arrangement was following a recent Reds’ Super Rugby game where Digby Ioane took to the soap box of the angry nerd to tweet New Zealand referee Keith Brown was “the worst ref ever” (served!).
Predictably Ioane was court marshalled for his quip, only for his coach Ewen Mcckenzie to receive a classified email from SANZAR admitting that Brown was in fact at fault on a number of contentious calls.
In stark contrast to such cloak and dagger was a game in the NRL on the same week where Video Ref Paul Simpkins produced a clanger, which was immediately identified as so by an apologetic referee’s boss (and ex super-ref) Bill Harrigan to all and sundry, with Simpkins dropped for the following round.
Such transparency is appreciated by the man in the street and is the very reason Silverwood should emulate the great Billy Thompson and be given the key pea in tandem with an NRL local for Origin this year.
He’ll be unbiased, unassuming, unwavering… trust me, you won’t even know he was there.
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