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The conservative nature of the NRL match officials in 2015 is now out of control. The referrals to the video referee, if not at an all-time high, are at all-time levels of annoying.
The final straw for me came on Monday night at Brookvale when one of our most experienced referees – and our top referee – referred a “possible knock on at dummy half” to the video for review.
The player in question was Jake Granville, who picked the ball up off the deck cleanly and bobbled it as he secured his grip before firing a pass infield before a perfect chip to the corner for a Cowboys try.
Perfectly executed, the kick weighted exquisitely for a bounce to the winger’s bread basket, and the opening try of the night belonged to the men from Townsville.
Except we had to have it reviewed, in which case not only is the bobble at dummy half shown but so is the chasers on the kick, because that is the protocol the video referees must follow. If there’s a kick in the sequence leading to a try and the decision is referred for review, the position of the kick chasers is checked as a matter of course.
It helps eliminate any possible errors from players who were not detected by the on-field officials. However, those are few and far between, and if the officials are in doubt they will ask.
This may sound like I’m bagging my former colleagues. I am not. If I was still part of it I would be referring the same amount of decisions as I am seeing each week. I have no problem with checking anything, because they are working within the constraints of a very conservative system designed to eliminate errors at the expense of the game.
Yet the great advantage rugby league has over many other sports is its non-stop action. There are no ‘time-outs’ like American football or basketball. We play halves and not quarters like they do in Australian rules. We don’t have the fullback kicking the soccer ball over to his left side defender, across the field to the right, back to the centre, and then back to the goalkeeper to launch it downfield.
Instead we have our own version of all those things: the video referee referral.
It’s time we eliminated it. I have had an opportunity to view the whole method from outside the insular sphere of the NRL officials. It’s annoying the hell out of me that we check restarts of play at goal-line drop outs. In the State of Origin 3 we stopped play after Josh Dugan had run the ball out of the in-goal to check if it was dead first.
We had rugby league’s biggest global audience in history yet we were showcasing the video ref.
I’m late to the party on this, I know. Roarers have been agitating change for years. So here’s my take on it and my pipe dream.
The on-field officials should never refer anything to the video referee.
They get far more decisions right than they get wrong, and this is seen week after week by the live decision offered by the touch judges on touchline and grounding which is almost always correct. Same goes with the in-goal decisions on restarts of play. Our guys hardly ever get them wrong, yet we are so conservative in our processes that we review the decision anyway.
My proposal is that when a decision is made on the field, that’s the decision that stands – until the aggrieved captain challenges it. It’s simple, we let the officials do their job and if a team is adamant that it was wrong they can challenge it and have it reviewed by the video referees.
It serves two purposes. Firstly, the game keeps flowing and we eliminate so many unnecessary stoppages. Secondly, the onus on judging if a call is right or wrong falls back on the players. If their judgment is out and they are proved wrong then they’ve burnt one of their challenges and the officials’ call is vindicated.
If the player is proven correct then the decision is overturned and we are in no worse position than we were before: calls are overturned all the time anyway.
There are going to be positives and negatives. The Newcastle Knights could challenge the decision that Dave Taylor’s goal-line drop out on Saturday night actually went the required 10 metres. They were adamant that it hadn’t from their reaction. Let them challenge it and come up looking like geniuses or fools. The point is that it would now be their choice, so the officials can’t lose.
We are still going to have problems such as the Andrew Fifita grounding in Canberra on Saturday. Once it’s referred for review only one person’s opinion counted and it was judged by the NRL hierarchy that it was wrong.
However, under my proposal Ashley Klein would have awarded the try and it would be up to the Raiders to challenge it. From what I saw from Raiders captain Jarrod Croker’s dismay he may not have bothered. Since the game was on the line he might have used it anyway, the same as desperate cricket teams to. If they’d already used up all their challenges, then the Canberra team would be blamed for their injudicious use.
Our officials might have still got it wrong, but I won’t be yelling at the television in my lounge room at the other hundred times the video referral was needlessly used.
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