Firstly I want to say that the game was of a very high quality with both defences keeping the score low.
It's a shame that the changed call incident is going to overshadow what was an extremely high quality game
I was at the game, so I didn't have the benefit of replay until this morning . I saw the referee signal 6 to go and thought "he got that wrong, no Rooster touched that". Then when we got the ball I thought I must have mistaken the "6 again" signal for "its still the 5th" and didn't think any more of it until after the game when people started talking about the change
Watching it this morning the referee changed the signal (which he shouldn't have done, even if he was correcting an error on the advice of the other official who had a better view) before the ball was passed to Wighton.
Wighton did have opportunity to see the referees call, but unfortunately for Canberra he missed it and he missed the opportunity to put through a kick.
At the turnover, which took quite a few moments, the Raiders were given time to set their defensive line. From that point the Roosters put on a brilliant set and scored a great Rugby League try.
Now, somecpeople want us to believe that that single decision by a referee is the sole reason why the Roosters beat the Raiders. That every single play the ball, every tackle, every run, every kick is somehow rendered irrelevant.
Yes an error was made, but you should be able to defend those errors.
When the Roosters went down to 12 men, we defended that. In the first 30 minutes of thecsecond half the Raiders had six complete sets of play the balls in the Roosters half compared to the Roosters 9 play the balls the Roosters had in attack. They didn't score off any of them.
When the Roosters were twice tackled in the field of play and then pushed back into the end goal, which is a penalty awarded usually, the Roosters had to kick line drop outs. No one is talking about those calls.
I get that the result isn't what most people wanted. Hell, even I, a die hard Roosters supporter, wouldn't have begrudged Canberra that win.
But to pretend the result was down to a single incident is as laughable as it is childish. As Rugby League supporters, we need to stop doing this.
It talks the game down and serves no purpose other than create animosity .
Maybe that's the reason people do it. They need to hate more than they need to admire