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Whether you’re a sportsperson or a match official, when you’ve had a good game you know it when you head to the tunnel.
If you’ve absolutely nailed it, you know that as well. And if you’ve had a shocker – well, you’re going to want to find the first wombat hole you can find to crawl into and disappear from the world.
I’ve been there and it’s not a great place to be.
Yet in elite sport you can’t simply hide from your mistakes and hope to have a better game the next week. Part of being professional in performance is preparation and evaluation. You need to be ready to do the best job you can do and once it’s done – whether it be good, bad, or a train wreck – you need to consider every aspect and look to improve.
NRL referees are no different to any other elite sport. When the game is over they watch the game themselves and review every tackle, every play-the-ball, every pass, every kick chaser – if it happened in the game, you can guarantee the match officials have pored over it on video.
Up until a few years ago all these game reviews were done on a Monday morning at the NRL referees’ headquarters inside ANZ Stadium. An evaluator was assigned to each game and I would bring along my notes from my review of the game and our match officials group would go through the video from one incident to the next.
The referees and the other touch judge would offer their view on things I had done and I would comment on what I would see them do. You would be reluctant to bring up anything really good you had done to contribute to the game, but if your mates had your back they would raise it and with any luck your good decisions far outweighed your bad ones.
Yet in reality there was only one person whose opinion mattered, and that was your evaluator. Up until two years ago that person would be a retired first-grade match official, the likes of Paul Simpkins, Sean Hampstead or Bill Harrigan.
The system changed in 2013 when Daniel Anderson took over from Bill Harrigan and Stuart Raper, who were unceremoniously shown the door after the infamous Greg Inglis State of Origin try in 2012. It kickstarted the erosion of confidence in factions of the referees’ group.
It was a bit like the situation involving with Geoff Toovey now – once the dogs started barking they couldn’t be muzzled.
The regime change brought a change of personnel and Anderson brought in people who were former footballers instead. Of course they were going to know more about the game than the referees ever could – I mean, what would referees know about rugby league? Preposterous to have them running the referees’ department.
So we had Anderson instead telling us where we went wrong, instructing us in having to understand the ‘balance’ of the game. The ‘live decision’ call on all possible tries came in. And the reviews became more thorough – a copy of your initial independent review had to be sent through to the boss. No more fudging your way through the review having not seen the game because it was too much fun at the Mad Cow nightclub in Townsville.
Then at the end of 2013 Daniel Anderson took up the director of coaching role at that fortress of solidarity that is the Parramatta Eels.
Indeed, the running joke among the referees was that being the referees’ boss was that bad a job he had to go and take up a role with the wooden spoon holders.
Anderson’s assistant that year, Tony Archer, took over for the 2014 season and the reviews changed again. Every game was reviewed with the evaluator the following morning or that same night. That means if I was officiating a game on a Saturday at 7.30pm at ANZ Stadium I would need to watch the game again that night to be prepared for the evaluation the next morning.
That wasn’t much fun a lot of the time, especially if you’ve had a dusty game and you need to be honest with yourself that you’ve affected the match officials’ team performance.
However, the most significant change was the way the evaluations were marked. Instead of each decision being marked right, wrong, or could have been better, demerit and ‘effort’ points were introduced.
Archer explained that in his conferences with elite performance managers of other professional sports officials, the performances came down to a number. In a nutshell if you stuff things up you attract demerit points depending on the severity. If you do something beyond the expected you will earn effort points. The philosophy is to have a certain balance between the negative and the positive.
It’s not terrific motivation to be told how bad you’re doing all the time.
The point evaluation system works on two separate scales. Two points are allocated for a lot of the good stuff an official has done. For a pocket referee it might be working really hard to get to the opposite side of the ruck to be in best position to rule on a lost ball. For a touch judge it might be identifying an interchange forward in the middle of a mass of players who is one metre offside on a kick chase. Those things are hard to get sometimes, so there’s a reward in the evaluation system available.
On the other side of the ledger are the demerit points, dished out for errors of judgment, law, communication, or poor positioning. Starting with 100, they can be eroded quickly depending on the performance.
Minus two might be applied for missing a forward pass from acting half, ruling a knock-on when the ball has gone backwards, or minus one for using the wrong vocabulary in assisting the lead referee (for example stealing the ball two-on-one in a tackle is a ‘strip’ – never a ‘rake’, ‘steal’ or any other term). Anyone can make those mistakes and they occur each game.
But now we come to the heavy penalties for the match officials – the minus 10. An official attracts minus 10 demerit points for incorrectly applying the laws of the game, an incorrect ruling leading to points or an incorrect ruling requiring further action (e.g. an attempted trip that should have been placed on report).
These are the key decisions in games that really get the fans irate. If an official misses a knock-on and the team scores a try that set of six tackles: minus 10. If an official rules a strip and awards a penalty which is converted to a goal, yet the video shows it was a lost ball: minus 10.
If Ryan Hinchcliffe plays the ball facing his own team’s goal-line rather than his opponents’ line and Jared Maxwell fails to penalise: minus 10. He can’t simply feel sorry for him and pack a scrum – that’s an error of law.
As former grand final referee Michael Stone said to me very early in my career, “Knowing the laws of the game inside out is what separates us from the bloke in the stand eating a pie!” Getting the laws wrong is a cardinal sin for elite officials.
I was part of a howler last season when the Panthers took on the Roosters at Allianz Stadium. A 40-20 attempt from the Roosters was touched by Matt Moylan while he was in the air over the touchline. He just flicked it before his foot hit the ground, which negated the 40-20 and should have rendered it a scrum with a Roosters feed. Touch judge Luke Potter ruled it a 40-20, which on review was wrong by one frame on the slow-motion replay.
This was compounded by the Roosters’ quick tap and a shift to the right of the field while the Panthers were streaming back to defend. Elijah Taylor almost got there but didn’t and I called to referee Ashey Klein, “Taylor hasn’t got there, offside – involved!” That’s the key word for the referee to pull the trigger, so Ash awarded the offside penalty and promptly sin-binned the hapless Taylor, without whom the Panthers never recovered.
We were judged to have stuffed that up by former Raiders coach Andrew Dunemann – minus 10s all round. Yet as much as Dunemann bemoaned my lack of speed down the touchline, my live decisions were always pretty good.
On a live decision in a Cowboys match in Townsville I ruled a try in the corner as the live decision and the video refs couldn’t tell. Dunemann spent 10 minutes looking at it in our review that night and couldn’t tell.
“It’s more a try than not,” he concluded, “How did you get that?”
“How did I get that? Well I was in good position, wide of the touchline with an angle so that I could see the ball down and the feet at the same time, and I saw a try. That’s my job,” I replied.
How many minus 10s will we see this weekend, Roarers? Let me know in the comments when you see them, and we’ll evaluate whether the officials have got it wrong – or you have!
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