Once you have gambling in sport it is open for corruption, cheating, bias whatever you want to call it. It’s the floored thing called human nature and it only takes one bad egg.
I am also convinced some refs have teams they just dislike and teams they favour. Again it’s that floored thing called human nature. You will also get refs who want the favourite to win in the match because that is less controversial thing to happen and there’s less discrepancies in the end result.
Also don’t just look at the penalty count or six again count. Take note what tackle he has pulled the infringement. The penalty or 6 again blown on the 4th or 5th tackle are killers and the ones blown on the 1st or 2nd don’t hurt as much. And then look at when the penalty count can change around garbage time. You could be getting hammered 10-3 in the count or something like that and the game is well and truly done and then you suddenly get some garbage time penalties and it finishes 10-8 so it’s harder to say the ref had a bearing on the game. Also take note of the decisions that go to the bunker that are 50/50 and they all go to one team. Especially the ones where the commentators are baffled with the crap that the video ref is saying. Remembering that the commentators are instructed to not be to controversial about refereeing decisions.
Don’t know if they still do, but I always felt Melbourne would deliberately give away 2-3 penalties in a row on 1st tackle. Slow the game down but also plays into the referees mind that he’s given 3 penalties against Melbourne so he evens up and usually ended up being on 4th/5th tackles.
But the referee bias is so obvious now they’re mic’ed up. The other week v Warriors he gives a clear explanation to SJ on why the Sharks player wasn’t sin binned. Later when call goes against Sharks he won’t talk to them and tells them to go away. Klein is the worst for not wanting to talk to or explain his decisions to certain teams.
On the overall corruption, it’s hard not to feel that way. Whilst it may not always correlate to grand final results, but the league would definitely prefer bigger clubs there when it counts. They can’t turn a shit Broncos into grand finalists but if they’re in the mix it’s better they make it than a Sharks or Warriors. Same with Roosters and South’s.
But the hardest part to ignore is when certain referees show clear bias and they continue to get the big games. We only won on 2016 as the no1 referee f**ked up in the Brisbane final and was dropped for someone who actually liked us!
