There’s a bit of an affirmative action thing going on here which is hurting the product. I’m a big supporter of women in league, but the pool of male referees is just so much bigger. If they’re mandating that at least two regular first grade referees be female, the pool of candidates for those jobs could honestly be 1% the size or less than the pool of male candidates. Likely even smaller!
You can’t pick 20%+ of the referees from a pool of less than 1% of candidates. Almost definitionally this means that Sharpe, Badger etc have the job over two more deserving male candidates. Bad refereeing can decide games unfairly. There is too much invested in the game to allow that.
And ultimately I don’t think it’s good for inclusion either, I bet plenty of punters think that women make shit referees now and we straight up shouldn’t have any, because Sharpe and Badger are so bad. Whereas, there’s no biological reason why women would be worse, there just aren’t many of them around, and they haven’t been doing it as long. They’re not getting the job on the basis of being in the top percentile of referees in the sport, they’re just better than all the relatively inexperienced women.
I’m absolutely open to the idea of a merit-based selection meaning we end up with a female referee or two, but all the referees should come from one pool. Female participation in the sport has been trending up for years. Let the march of progress follow its natural course. Don’t force it.
Agree with all of this. Sharpe is comfortably the worst of a bad bunch and the NRL shouldn't be putting her in these positions just because she's a woman. As you say there's too much at stake in these games.
I would add that not just Sharpe but all of the referees, while they're making plenty of basic mistakes, are also being put in bad positions by the NRL. Current referees have to contend with:
- Different crackdowns that change focus from week to week (remember the disruptor? lol). Right now they're being asked to police the foot on the PTB - of course it's going to be ridiculously inconsistent when your focus is constantly shifting to different parts of the game.
- Captains challenges where the Bunker has the advantage of being able to inspect random decisions from multiple angles and slow speeds. As we saw with the Hastings marker penalty, the Bunker is also pulling up things that weren't even challenged in the first place. This means teams are more likely to win these challenges, which not only means the referees are constantly being proven wrong, but it drags games out and affects the product for the viewer.
- The other consequence of the captains challenge is that definitions for things like a knock on has changed. For 100 years we all knew what a knock-on looked like. Now the referees are constantly being challenged on if the ball literally went backwards or not. Which sounds fine in theory, but it's now one rule for the knock ons that get challenged and one rule for every other lost ball, as some referees are still (fairly) somewhat stuck in the old definition of a knock on that we all grew up with.
- 6 agains. This is an obvious one, just no accountability or oversight on these from week to week. We're just asked to accept it even though they have a huge impact on the game.
