Pick up your pitchforks Wests Tigers fans: The NRL robbed you and it is black and white

The NRL thrives in grey areas. It’s the ultimate administrative ‘get out of jail free’ card, being able to simply put forward the notion that the rules can be subjective and therefore the indefensible is, actually, entirely acceptable.

We saw Graham Annesley absolutely revel in the grey during yesterday’s weekly football briefing, in which he admitted that the match officials in the Cowboys vs Wests Tigers game had made the wrong call but followed the correct process.

(If you need catching up on what happened in the final half a second in North Queensland, here’s a link – also, welcome out from under your rock!)

“We are just not satisfied that there was enough in that incident to warrant the decision of the Bunker to award a penalty kick,” Annesley said.

And look, that sentence is just a skerrick of what was a wide-ranging discussion of one incident in one game, followed by questions from the assembled media.

Annesley talked about why the game restarted after Adam Doueihi failed to convert the seemingly match-winning try, despite the time reading 79:59 and logic suggesting it was more than fair to call it a day.

He explained the reason Chad Townsend was allowed to mount a captain’s challenge so long after the incident, despite only having ten seconds to challenge after the whistle, was because referee Chris Butler was being mobbed by players – and apparently he needed to check in with the Bunker because it’s too much to expect a referee to remember whether a team has got their one successful challenge left.

He also went off on a weird tangent about how he has never apologised and never will due to a referee making an error – I’d have thought an innocent mistake is exactly the time to say you’re sorry, especially if you’re the boss and the buck stops with you.

But whatever. I guess they’re all sufficiently grey areas to justify Annesley saying the game just shook out the way that it did.

Even the Bunker getting the final call wrong is not grounds to overturn a result. I mean, it absolutely sucks for the Tigers and their long-suffering fans, but if we’re going to overturn the result of a game based on a refereeing decision, we open Pandora’s Box. Granted it was after the game had logically finished, but does that mean the NRL would then step in and strip in-game points that are scored in similar circumstances? A team’s points differential can matter, you know.

No, the club just has to cop that one too – it may not be fair, but that’s the way sport works.

What I absolutely cannot get on board with is Annesley trying to excuse the process that led to the captain’s challenge.

(Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)

Not long after the game finished, an NRL spokesperson said the reason it was permissible for Townsend to appeal for a captain’s challenge was because Butler had blown a “short whistle” to stop time, not a long one to end the game.

“So he blows the whistle to stop play, but that is not the end of the game. That first whistle is not the full-time whistle. That is a whistle to stop play,” Annesley said.

For the record, I watched the final play of the Titans vs Bulldogs game. You know what you hear when the player with the ball is tackled after the siren? Just a series of long whistles from the referee indicating the game is over.

There was no short whistle to indicate time off before saying it’s also time expired.

Because that’s stupid. Why would you call time off purely to then call time’s up?

Now, some journos have pointed out that the short whistle has been used at the end of other tight games, which completely shifts the rules of the captain’s challenge. It means the challenge is only for a stoppage in play, except at the end of really close matches, at which point the referee stops the game at full time, then presumably waits ten seconds to see if any captain wants to challenge anything that happened in the final passage of play.

So to these journos defending the short whistle, I ask: in the other games you saw the ref blow a short whistle, did they then wait ten seconds before calling full time? Because if not, they have robbed any captain that has a challenge up their sleeve of the opportunity to have one last crack at changing final scoreline.

But if the ref does wait ten seconds in these games – they don’t, you’d notice, because ten seconds of nothing happening on a footy field is actually ages – that’s against the rules.

And this is where Annesley is found out. Because he’s got no grey to hide in, despite his insistence to the contrary.

Murray Taulagi is tackled. (Photo by Ian Hitchcock/Getty Images)

“You won’t find any specific rule that is black and white about can you make a challenge if time has expired on the last tackle of the game,” Annesley said.

“People will have different views on this because there is nothing you can point to that is black and white that specifically refers to what happened yesterday.”

Nothing you can point to that is black and white? How about the laws of the game?

I looked into both the NRL’s website, at ‘The Game’ page (PSA: the NRL website is still a disaster zone that, 18 months after I pointed it out, I am actually mad hasn’t been fixed), and the International Rugby League’s ‘Laws of the Game’.

Now I know the IRL and the NRL aren’t perfectly aligned on all rules but on the matter of “end of play”, both read word-for-word, exactly the same:

“If time expires in either half when the ball is out of play or a player in possession has been tackled and the ball has not been played the Referee shall immediately blow his whistle to terminate play.”

Not “shall blow a short whistle, have a bit of a natter with both captains, then when everyone is satisfied with the outcome, shall then terminate play”, the literal laws of the game instruct the referee to “immediately blow his whistle to terminate play”.

That’s as black and white as a Western Suburbs Magpies jumper.

And it’s why the Wests Tigers should continue to kick and scream about these two points.

Losing because a referee made an error sucks, but it’s part of sport. All sport.

But to lose because the match officials ignored the laws of the game that exclusively instruct that the game had finished? That’s not something you can just explain away.

Well, unless you’re Graham Annesley.