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The NRL has taken an exciting step forward in 2016, with the introduction of the ‘Bunker’.
If you’re not familiar with this term, put simply, all video refereeing decisions will be made off site, using a set up which looks like something out of a CIA movie.
Gone are the days of standing on your seat, turning and facing the video referee box, and booing as loud as possible as they took an eternity to make a decision.
That’s the down side.
The up side is the what is the perceived advantage, which apparently provides NRL fans with the word we have long been waiting for, consistency.
Only two men, Luke Patten and Bernie Sutton, are in charge of making these crucial decisions each week. The consistency here is great, actually it is brilliant, but my issue with the new system has nothing to do with the bunker, but rather how the NRL referees will be coached to use the new technology.
Now in all fairness, as it stands, nothing has changed. If a referee is unsure of their decision, they are still going to send the call upstairs. That’s inevitable. But if consistency is what the NRL is after, is every call going to be sent to Patten and Sutton?
Is it fair and consistent for Jared Maxwell to make a decision on his own, which he has every right to seeing as though he’s a referee, compared to Ashley Klein who might send every decision to the bunker?
If consistency is what the NRL is after, my question is this, will every referee be sending every scoring play to the bunker, and if not, how is this better than the system implemented previously?
I guess my questions will be answered in the coming weeks and months. But for me, unless every referee is on the same page, and all decisions are sent to the bunker, we still have the same problems as always.
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