To label the standard of current NRL refereeing a crisis would be to undersell through cliché just how damaging poor officiating has been to rugby league – the standard at which officials are operating is having a more negative impact than nearly anything else in the sport.
Getting universal agreement on any matter in rugby league is about as likely as spotting the Loch Ness monster in Sydney Harbour but almost to a man there was agreement that Sia Soliola should have been sent off for his tackle that was both late and high, and left Billy Slater splayed motionless on the Canberra Stadium turf.
Not only was it a send off in the modern game, it was a send off in any era of the code, even the dark old days when thuggery was as much a part of the sport as Deep Heat, cauliflowered ears and contested scrums.
Slater was slipping but Soliola had ample time to pull out of the tackle, he certainly didn’t need to swing his arm and there was clear contact with Slater’s head from the upper part of Soliola’s arm and/or shoulder. The incident was so serious Slater took no further part in the game and Soliola was referred straight to the judiciary. He will get at least four weeks.
Yet referee Matt Cecchin – regarded as the best official in the game and, at the very least, the one with the most common sense – didn’t march Soliola. On the obvious advice from The Bunker, Cecchin put Soliola on report, allowing him to finish the match.
The rugby league world was left stunned.
As long as there has been refereeing, there have been complaints about referees. That is par for the course. It is a sport as old as rugby league itself. This goes far beyond the one-eyed barbs and the occasional perplexing decision though. This goes to the very fabric of who is actually controlling a game and who in fact is determining the laws by which the game is played and officiated.
It is quite apparent that the head referee of a game no longer controls the on-field action. Ownership no longer belongs to the man with the whistle. At the very least, the head referee is subservient to The Bunker, an institution that in its short existence has become known primarily for its creeping influence and an ability to get wrong even the most obvious decisions. To make The Bunker the game’s most powerful on-field arbiter is akin to making a failed reality-show host president of the most powerful country in the world.
The on-field referees are so concerned about perception that they are more focussed on keeping a match even, appeasing their boss’s “interpretations” of the rules and palming off accountability for any difficult decision than they are with enforcing the laws of the sport and maintaining control of a match. Referees once had authority. That has not been taken away by outside forces but given away by themselves and their leaders.
Referees today are crippled by a combination of fear of creating imbalance and a misguided sense of superiority. Referees no longer want to impose themselves on a match yet they believe themselves to know more about the game than coaches, players, commentators and fans. They want to blend into the background yet have a burning need to demonstrate their superior intellect. They are more worried about management consultant lingo like “process”, “review” and “indicators” than actually getting a feel for a match and an understanding of the actual rules.
This goes back to the leadership and in particular, referees boss Tony Archer. He has created this culture. Refereeing is highly reactionary and more concerned with newspaper criticism and talkback chatter than actual performance. He has not only allowed the standard of refereeing to run deep into the holler, but has systematically created a petri dish where that could be the only result. Referees are now ranked more on their ability to follow process than they are at achieving results.
More concerning is the overstepping of boundaries into law-making the senior referee leadership has made in recent years. Through their so-called interpretations, the refereeing fraternity have now become the game’s primary law-makers through what can only be called a silent coup.
Referees are police officers. They are not members of the judiciary or parliamentarians. Yet they as a collective are determining the laws. Interpretations should give referees latitude to insert personal opinion. They should not allow rules to be fundamentally altered, changed, ignored or inserted, as is very much the case now. The send off has been eviscerated from the game, as has the voluntary tackle, and the correct way to play-the-ball is not through their removal from the laws of rugby league but through the interpretations made by NRL referees as dictated by the refereeing leadership.
It is a dangerous area for the game to be in, particularly with referees being arguably the least accountable stakeholders in the game. Ricky Stuart really had no right to complain about the refereeing on Saturday night but he was spot on in his assessment that Archer and the referees are not accountable when they should be.
At the moment we have a refereeing fraternity that is unaccountable, that believes it is their job to make the rules, who then seek to palm responsibility to The Bunker on the field while picking and choosing what rules they enforce and the rules they ignore. It is a terrible situation with the game itself paying a very heavy price.
