That game yesterday was bitterly dissappointing for me.
Firstly, Parramatta played like sh*t and Souths were too woeful to take advantage of it.
But to top it all off, the two imbeciles out in the middle were just utterly pathetic for the whole game. I'm not going to argue over who got the advantage out of the terrible reffing. At the end of the day, I was just disgusted at the fact that an ordinary game was completely put out of its misery by the boneheads with the whistles.
I'm sure the Parra fans there walked out happy with the win. But I'm equally sure that they were just as dissappointed in the standard of the officials. The NRL needs to sit down and have a good hard look at what constitutes a penalty and what doesn't. That game yesterday would be a good starting point for them. Without looking at the figures, I would guess there were about 20 penalties blown? Perhaps 8 of those were fair dinkum. Perhaps they could have found another 4 or 5 that they missed.
To confound matters, because of their own stupid over-officiating, they then send off a couple of players for nothing, simply because there were too many penalties.
This process of binning one player and then automatically binning a player from the other team on the next innocuous penalty is a complete joke and has reared its head in two Souths games so far this year.
I'm also of the opinion that the same thing happens with the penalty count. One team gets heavily penalised early and then the refs start looking for any dirt they can dig up on the other side to even the penalty count out. I'm sure its a KPI that they have that penalty counts should be near enough to even at the end of the match. Looks good on the score sheet, but absolutely cruels both sides and completely shifts momentum when perhaps it shouldn't be shifted. I think its a key reason why we are seeing so many big leads being cut down later in the game this year.
Really, the Refs need to focus on the big stuff, forget about the sh*tty little penalties and only penalise what absolutely needs to be called. If its one sided, then, as long as its fairly one sided, i.e. the team getting caned are earning the penalties, then so be it. This business of squaring up for the sake of it is just plain stupid and is ruining the game.
I've said it all along, two referees mean twice as many blunders. I also had to laugh yesterday as I'm 100% sure I saw Beau Champion moving in towards the ruck to take a hit up at one point and the second ref nudged him out of the way because his view of the ruck was obstructed. Beau looked a bit miffed and then nudged the ref back so he could run his line, but at this stage the dummy half had taken off anyway. It was late in the game and had no effect whatsoever on the outcome, but I had to laugh at the time.
haha
