Autumn: The prince of seasons

Autumn – the prince of seasons – heralds kick-off to the greatest game of all as rugby league gets underway for 2016.

Summer is hot, winter is cold, and spring keeps you thinking summer is just around the corner before a week of miserable drizzle and temperature maximums in the mid-teens drops you straight back into the bleakness.

Autumn alone stands as the three months of the year where the days are warm, the nighttime chill encourages sleep, and days stretch on without a cloud to be seen. Sunday afternoons at the footy – does it get any better?

I love autumn. In my days as a match official it meant the season was underway, the pre-season training was behind me and we were into the meat of the calendar.

Training and I were not best buddies. In my first NRL pre-season, the touchies and younger refs spent every Monday afternoon at the Wanda sandhills under the instruction of Bill Harrigan. This was after a whole morning of running and fitness work. Not my idea of fun.

Yet autumn also meant match payments. Glorious, lovely freight-shipped straight into my bank account to help pay the bills while I wasn’t earning anything at my day job. (Touch judges are not paid for trial games – even televised matches like the Charity Shield and All-Stars, so the remuneration was welcomed.)

My love of the game extends to volunteering at my local club and coaching my boy’s Under-8s team. NRL? That’s just business.

I digress – what will 2016 hold for the referees?

There have been a few changes in personnel in the first-grade ranks – Gavin Morris has taken up a teaching opportunity in the Northern Territory. Steve Carrall went out a winner with the 2015 grand final before retiring. Robert Finch, the former NRL head referees’ coach has returned in a managerial capacity that sees him work alongside Tony Archer.

My understanding is that Finch will handle all media and club enquiries and leave Archer to handle the referees, which he is far more comfortable doing.

There have been a few rule changes that the NRL have decided to introduce. Again, as has been happening far too often the last ten years or so, the National Rugby League has taken it upon itself to change the laws of rugby league without bothering to inform the Rugby League International Federation.

It’s almost like the NRL’s own insistent comparisons to the AFL has carried through to the laws, forgetting that rugby league is played competitively in over 40 nations. The AFL is played only in Australia so they can make their own rules on the run as much as they like.

Commission chairman John Grant can call Manly the ‘Seagulls’ and Cronulla the ‘Hawks’ – just don’t insult the rest of the league world by failing to confer with the international governing body before you go around changing the laws.

Nevertheless, the changes are in place. Teams will have to pack scrums within 35 seconds and take line drop-outs within 30 seconds under the glare of a ‘shot clock’. What a source of entertainment that will be – staring at an electronic timer while the players and officials are doing the same when they should be playing a game of footy.

The ‘differential penalty’, as rare as the white rhino in the modern era, has been reintroduced as a soft option for the referees in the play the ball. This year, when a player rolls the ball between his legs and fails to make a “genuine attempt to play the ball” he will be penalised.

More mature Roar readers will remember that the differential penalty was introduced in the early 1980s when players such as former Parramatta great and current Gerringong coach Mick Cronin would take advantage of scrum penalties to slot points from the sand pile. These days, as coaches have largely failed to instruct teams to contest scrums, the differential penalty is seldom seen.

Now it’s back, because it is nigh impossible to get all referees to get on board with one instruction or another if they don’t buy into it, as I wrote last year.

Perhaps knowing a team can’t win a game directly from the penalty kick might ease that reluctance to blow the whistle.

The big question will be how the new video review system works. We’ve seen it work with differing results during the All-Stars game, where some decisions were quick and others took longer than expected.

I believe it will be quicker, as I wrote when the prospect was first raised. However, it relies on technology and the availability of vision from all cameras to work. Whether that is going to be as reliable as the $1 million-plus price tag commands is going to be interesting to see.

It will still beat the previous system of every eye in the grandstand glaring squarely at the video refs’ box demanding an immediate decision.

Let’s enjoy 2016 – every fan’s team is on equal points as you read this – and remember that the match officials are getting on with the job of being impartial facilitators of a game of rugby league.

If your team loses the game let’s talk about the missed tackles and lost ball before we talk about ‘Yeah, but that one decision!’.