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One issue that has not be sufficiently explored in the wake of Friday night’s disappointing scenes is the role that rugby league media plays in aggravating controversial incidents involving officiating.
Much like the salary cap, blaming the refs is a go-to move for far too many in rugby league.
James Graham’s charge-down was a penalty, with protecting the legs of kickers having been emphasised for the last season or two. Whether Graham intended to scythe Reynolds’ legs or not is irrelevant – few intend to make a high tackle either but that doesn’t make it any less a penalty.
It is also abundantly clear that Graham and David Klemmer’s behaviour towards the referee after the penalty was awarded was completely unacceptable. One can only hope the judiciary takes appropriate action on Wednesday evening. Rugby league cannot become like football, where players routinely scream in the face of referees.
Sadly, the quality of the refereeing and in particular the video review system has been an ongoing talking point this season, and a culture of ref blaming seems to have taken hold. No doubt Bulldogs fans in the crowd were frustrated, but rather than blaming their team – who blew an eight-point lead and wasted a glut of possession and a dominant forward display – they choose to target, literally, the refs.
Of course there are many reasons for the petulant response of the Dogs fans, and the sentiments if not the actions are common to many fan-bases. However the attitude towards referees of many in the media cannot be helping. In particular Phil Rothfield of The Daily Telegraph and Phil Gould in his commentary on Channel Nine and published material, have made the NRL administration and referees in particular out to be public enemy number one for league fans.
Rothfield is the chief proponent of the ‘NRL in crisis’ agenda and he routinely makes mountains out of molehills to sell newspapers. If one were to read only Rothfield’s offerings one would assume the game is on the brink of extinction rather than a billion-dollar success story.
So it was no surprise to see on Friday afternoon that Buzz immediately jumped on social media to express his outrage with the penalty decision and imply that the very fabric of rugby league was soon to be torn asunder. To Rothfield’s credit he later retracted that sentiment and conceded that a penalty was in fact the correct decision. However by that time he had already succeeded in whipping up a frenzy among aggrieved fans, both Bulldogs supporters and Rabbitohs haters alike.
Meanwhile, during the broadcast it took Gould’s fellow analyst, Peter Sterling, all of one replay and five seconds to correctly label the incident a penalty. Gould however was still arguing the decision well after the goal had been scored.
(I did not see the pre-game show for Channel Nine’s Sunday afternoon game, so it is possible that Gould also changed his view in retrospect, and I’m happy to be corrected on that.)
Gould’s comments during the game reflect on ongoing trend, as he routinely questions the decisions of the officials with his trademark exclamation of “No, no, no, no, no!”
Gould’s analysis is front and centre of both one Friday night game and the free-to-air Sunday game, and every chance he gets he uses this prodigious soapbox to pillory the officials. He even went as far as to claim recently in one of his regular newspaper columns that the game is now entirely about referees and their process.
In particular Gould espouses an odious brand of wilful ignorance and retrograde thinking about high tackles and dangerous throws. He has been openly sceptical about the dangers posed to the game by concussion lawsuits, and criticises pretty much any penalty awarded for a high tackle.
It is unclear whether Gould simply doesn’t know the rules, or if he thinks the rules should just be ignored because the game isn’t as tough as it used to be.
Either way, this culture of criticism builds a narrative that referees are not only failing to apply some unwritten code of toughness but that they are also in some way setting out to ruin the game of rugby league as we know it – or at least as we knew in the 1970s, when it was played by ‘real men’.
Let us be crystal clear: Friday afternoon’s events, both on the field and off it, have many causes. However the rugby league media, and some individuals in particular, contribute to an overall mentality that the entire NRL administration is lurching from crisis to crisis, and referees as a collective are actively trying to ruin the game.
This sort of attitude is at best unproductive and at worst destructive. Fans deserve better.
Follow Lachlan on twitter @mrsports83
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