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The rep weekend has come and gone, with only one more year to come around in its current format. And again, just like clockwork, the calls have gone out to revert to the pre-2009 single referee model of officiating.
Those people have forgotten what the game became prior to the introduction of a second on-field referee in 2009. The ruck speeds were terribly slow, leading to a grinding arm-wrestle style of play in many matches.
Defence was king, and any attacking flair was left in the change room as the desperation for banking two competition points outweighed any desire to entertain.
It wasn’t always this way. Do you remember who won the NRL grand final in 2005?
If you guessed the North Queensland Cowboys, you were wrong (they finished as beaten grand finalists). If you guessed the Wests Tigers, you win a cookie.
Both those teams played similar styles of football with long passes out the back set up by creative play out of dummy half from Aaron Payne and Robbie Farah. It was terrific to watch.
In fact leading up to the preliminary finals you could have just about written your own ticket with the bookies to see those two teams contesting the premiership.
Teams one and two were Parramatta and St George Illawarra who had both enjoyed a week off. The Tigers and Cowboys had finished four and five and while the most optimistic of fans were hopeful of an upset, only the deluded would have expected two.
Yet that’s how it happened. The Tigers defeated the Dragons and the Cowboys defeated the Eels, finishing with a 30 to 16 victory to the Tigers in the grand final.
That off-season, leading into the 2006 season, the referees and a lot of pundits expected other teams to copy the Tigers’ attacking style.
However, it went the other way. If teams couldn’t match the likes of Benji Marshall and Scott Prince with the ball, then they needed to find another way to counter it.
Enter the ‘wrestle’.
Coaches decided to stifle attacking play by controlling the ruck, winning the tackle and denying the opposition time to use the football. They did this through using martial arts-style techniques to lock the ball carrier so he could not escape the tackle until the tackler released him.
Melbourne Storm is usually held up as the pioneers of this but plenty of other clubs were doing the same thing.
It seemed to work. An average of 46.9 points were scored per match in 2005. This slumped to 43.4 per match in 2006 and 42.5 per match in 2007. In two years we had seen a 9 per cent drop in the number of points scored each game. Attack was beginning to be strangled out of the game.
The NRL needed to do something about it. As always, the coaches were a step ahead of the lawmakers and they needed to try to keep up.
A big part of controlling the tackle is locking a player in discretely, giving an illusion of genuine movement when demanded by the referee and often feigning being tangled with the ball carrier.
Players will also lever up off the tackled player (for example pushing down on the calf muscle as the tackler gets to his feet) and myriad other ways of slowing down the play the ball.
Introducing a second official on the park, or the ‘pocket’ referee, gave the officials much better vision of what was going on in the tackle. Slowly – and it took a couple of years – the players had to adjust to the presence of the pocket ref.
Eventually we got the results we wanted, as the speed of the play the ball increased overall. One measure used by the referees was provided by a sports statistics company. The number of fast, neutral and slow plays of the ball were recorded. From 2009 to 2010 the fast stat rose by 40 per cent.
Nowadays we see the wrestle not on the ground but in the defenders holding the ball carrier off the ground, eventually putting him on the ground at the last possible moment. That’s another story.
But back to the rep weekend where we saw one referee officiating the Australia versus New Zealand Test on Friday night and two pulsating games from four of the Pacific Nations on Saturday.
Whether you realise it or not, all of those games would have benefitted from a second referee. The Anzac Test was played a lot like an NRL game.
On Friday night New Zealand really pushed referee Gerard Sutton in the ruck. This resulted in several ruck penalties for holding down. A pocket referee, while not necessarily speed things up in any one game, would have provided a presence there for the players to release more quickly.
That referee would have also been able to tip Gerry on who the main culprits were (which happens in every NRL game every week).
As for Saturday’s games, the ruck speed wasn’t a concern as the carnival-like football was more indicative of a one-off match. The Pacific teams played in the most entertaining fashion and using the ball was far more important than controlling the ruck.
There are many instances were another set of eyes results in more accurate decisions. That is the case in all NRL matches. Except we had an unnecessary stoppage and potential scuffle in the Samoa versus Tonga game when Samoa’s Kirisome Auva’a was kneed by Tonga centre Solomene Kata.
Auva’a took offence to it and, finding no intervention forthcoming from officials, took matters into his own hands, which in the old days would have erupted into an all-in brawl.
The pocket referee would have had a perfect angle to view the indiscretion and would have stepped in immediately. We would have had a penalty and got on with the game.
Of course we might not have seen Kata give Auva’a a hug in reconciliation, but that night provided flair and highlights you wouldn’t see in a season of rugby union matches. I don’t think we would have missed it.
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