Cheating will continue while the refs refuse to use the sin bin

Last Friday night was a disaster for the NRL. When Ben Cummins sent the Broncos Matt Gillett to the sin bin in the second half of their clash against the Dragons, season 2014 became a farce.

But not because the Dragons scored 12 points while Gillett was off the field and harmed the Broncos oh-so-important for and against. That’s not even vaguely an issue for anyone but Brisbane. Frankly, if their season comes down to 12 points, they weren’t contenders anyway.

In reality the side that actually secures the final spot in the eight will only be making up the numbers and probably be eliminated in week one of the finals.

That the incident once more took the spotlight off the football and placed it onto the officials is also not a cause for disaster. Refs and touchies have always and will always make mistakes.

The teams, coaches and fans will in turn be outraged by them and the media will focus on the incidents and scream things like “shocker!” “blunder!” And yes of course “disaster!”

However, players make dreadful mistakes all the time. Cam Smith’s pass against the Roosters was a far worse blunder than Cummins’ in the scheme of the season, but far less has been made of it.

Why? Because rugby league officials are like toilet brushes – essential yet unloved.

I’ve got to know a few of the men in pink when doing the sideline for ABC Radio and discovered that they are often delightful family men who just love the game and love being involved. Being a first grade official is a great achievement.

They’ve had to outperform lots of other hopefuls in a very competitive environment. Not only do you have to be extremely fit to keep up with the play, you must also be confident enough to deal with the most arrogant, forceful, egotistical and bullying league players – and their rabid fans – while getting all the rulings right in what can be a super fast game.

Good luck with that.

The best that a ref can hope for is not to be noticed. The worst is to be reviled, blamed and – hardest of all – dropped. However, the NRL currently forces them to do their jobs without giving them access to the very technology the rest of us use to pick apart their rulings.

In an age of the game where high definition cameras capture every moment of the action from no less than eight – and sometimes up to fourteen – different angles, the role of the video refs in supporting the on-field officials must be expanded. It can no longer just be tries that are reviewed but pretty much every aspect of the game.

While ‘traditionalists’ may bemoan it as ‘Americanisation’ of the game and others say that it will slow the game down too much, it is the inevitable way of the future if for no other reason than that the refs and touchies must have more support to get it right.  Because in the end don’t we want to get the decisions right?

Why can’t a ref blow the whistle and say, “I’ve got a sin bin offence. Can you check on Gillett’s offside please?” 

Seems bloody obvious and reasonable to me. Why shouldn’t a video ref review an incident in general play? Why on earth aren’t forward passes reviewed? They are essentially an offside play.

Why, if we are packing a scrum anyway, can’t the video ref pipe up and say, “replay shows Jake Friend (for example) stripped the ball, penalty Storm”?

Those of us calling the game have the benefit of watching all those TV angles and replays to describe exactly what happened but for some odd reason the refs in the box can’t use the same power. Instead they have to cop flack for getting the calls wrong when they are denied the very technology that could help them get it right.

The referees are happy to blow the whistle, but the yellow and red cards stay firmly in the pocket. (AAP Image/Action Photographics,Colin Whelan)

But back to Friday night’s sin binning. The reason it was a disaster was because Cummins is one of the only refs with the courage to actually use the sin bin. Unfortunately he got the call wrong, but that he actually had the cojones to send a player off the field for 10 minutes should be celebrated.

It’s no secret that I want the bin used lots more. Without blowing my trumpet too hard, I was raising this issue well before it became fashionable. I was appalled that the reward that Manly and the Roosters got for giving away by far and away the most penalties in 2013 – effectively meaning they were the games biggest cheats – was to be in the grand final.

Maybe, as some of you Roarers have suggested, a five-minute bin needs to be reintroduced to make the refs less worried about using it.

The bin has only been used 18 times this season and 12 times in season 2013. That means only 0.6 per cent of the penalties awarded in 2013 and 0.75 per cent of the penalties awarded so far in 2014 were considered professional fouls.

While the rate of sin binnings has increased in 2014, it is almost entirely due to engaging in fisticuffs being a mandatory binning. That in turn has had the unfortunate run on effect of wiping out the stink from Origin – and Origin was built on the stink. The moment Artie Beetson punched Graeme Wynn in the 27th minute of the very first game was the moment Origin was born.

Lots of people love the fights. Yet no one likes the cynical wrestling, hands in the play the ball, offsides and hold downs but they proliferate unabated. They are deliberate cheating tactics used to slow the game down and allow defences time to reset. That stops scoring and scoring is what the crowds come to see.

With no real risk of being sin binned, there is no disincentive for these negative tactics. Penalising them clearly doesn’t work and this is supported by the stats. For the whole of 2013 there were 2220 penalties conceded.

With one round and the finals series to go in 2014 we already have had 176 more penalties conceded than last year’s total. Five of this season’s worst offenders are top eight sides, demonstrating that cheats are prospering.

Referee’s warnings after sides repeated infringements sound as hollow as a Monty Python line, “I’m warning you, if your side continues infringing I am going to give you an even sterner warning and maybe I’ll even threaten to use the bin. So watch out!”

The worst stat that goes along with all this is that the averaged tries scored per side per game has dropped from 3.7 last year to 3.3 this year. So we are seeing more cheating that is resulting in less scoring.

All we need now is to reintroduce the five-metre rule and we can send the game right back to the dark ages…

After last Friday night is that there is virtually no chance that another player will be sin binned again in 2014 – unless there is a fight. The officials are now too worried about getting a call wrong, getting smashed in the press and then being dropped to risk using the sin bin.

Trent Robinson, Geoff Toovey, Des Hasler, Madge Maguire, Craig Bellamy, Ivan Clearly and Paul Green will surely all know that.

So – just when we should be gearing up for the best footy of the season – get ready to be exposed to an explosion in the amount of hold downs, wrestling, hands on the ball and blatant offsides per game that will make the spread of Ebola in Africa seem relatively contained and pleasant.

Just watch as the penalty counts rise and the scoring dries up. The slower, stodgier games will be a turn off to many fans and it will not help the popularity of the game one bit.

In short, it’s a disaster.