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League has always been and always will be a simplistic game, brutally simplistic in fact, and here lies the main reason for its popularity.
Two teams of 13 players each on the paddock, run up and down the field, getting sets of six opportunities with the ball generally culminating with them kicking on the final play.
This simple structure leads to pure displays of the players’ strength, speed, and dazzling skills that seem to get more exceptional year on year.
Obviously, all sorts of permutations of this guideline can occur, but this is generally the structure of the game that Aussies now play in heaven.
Up and down, huge bodies continuously bashing into each other searching for a kink in the chain, for a team – or player – to submit, for someone to crack.
But, what if it isn’t a player that cracks? What happens when during the relentless breakneck speed of the game it’s a referee who cracks first?
Last Friday night’s game is what happens – Roosters vs Storm.
Every single year the players and coaches work their backsides off to make the NRL finals, but for every disappointed member of a team that didn’t make the eight there’s thousands more of disappointed loyal supporters that ride every hit, every pass, every on-year, and worse for them every off one.
These fans don’t deserve copping a dud call from a referee. Not when every game is televised from every conceivable angle and 95% of the game is already scrutinised ad nauseam by the officials.
No fan is going to begrudge a video ref for getting in the referee’s ear and say what we were all thinking: “Check, check, Ash, you’ve made a clanger.”
No one would have the right to be upset if play got dragged back a set, as long as the correct outcome was reached.
At the end of the day we will never know if the result would be different, it’s unimportant now.
What’s important is that a team’s been knocked out of the finals and their fans will be asking the big what-if … at least until kick-off next year.
What’s important is a ref has been given the sack for making a call he believed right at the time, when he had an all-seeing eye in the sky, perfectly capable of correcting him. The right outcome could have so easily been achieved, no need for punishing refs, no need for the fans’ woe is me act.
(Photo by Mark Evans/Getty Images)
Refs need to be praised for their decisive calls, because when they have reached the pinnacle level of the NRL they are elite (and get it right 99% of the time), just as the players and coaches are elite, but no matter how elite you may be, every now and then, under the relentless pressure, people crack and get it wrong.
So why is the NRL’s answer to this burying their heads in the sand, lashing the fans for rightfully acknowledging what we all saw clear as day on the telly, then proceeding to sack the referee.
Officials will always make mistakes just like players, and when they don’t have the luxury (or the curse) of the ball being followed at all times by cameras like all the amazing volunteer refs, their decisions need to be respected and finale.
But when that red light is on and that lens is zoomed right in, there’s no reason an NRL referee should ever be able to get it so wrong, or any reason for fans to fight for him to get sacked.
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