Match 12: Barrow (Away) Championship
fevnut's musings
Referees
We are seriously concerned about the
standard of refereeing this year. More often than not, when fans believe that a
referee has got a decision wrong, a check on the video will reveal that the
decision was actually correct. It is so hard to see things accurately from the
stands and terraces and the referee is so very much closer to the action. But
this year we have noticed many more refereeing ‘errors’ which are actually confirmed
as mistakes by checking the video recording.
Let’s make one thing clear. We are
NOT talking about bias. We don’t believe that referees are biased. It always
makes us laugh when the fans of both sides in a match believe that the ref is
biased against their team. No, we are talking about refereeing errors. All referees
make mistakes, just as players do, but there is something seriously wrong when
the number of errors seem to be increasing a great deal. Surely it is time that
the Match Officials department at Red Hall took a long hard look at how
referees are trained.
Not that we have much confidence in
the Match Officials department. Some of the selections of referees this year
seems to have been bizarre. Selecting a referee who is from the locality of one
of the teams inevitably puts pressure on a referee to show that he is not
biased. That can occasionally be to the detriment of the team who are located
at a base near the referee’s base. And yet, this season both our matches
against Batley and Dewsbury have been officiated by referees who are members of
the Dewsbury and Batley Referees Society. And now, this week, we travel all the
way to Barrow and the referee has almost the same journey from his Wakefield
base.
Even worse, it seems to us, is the
lack of any apparent attempt to consider the difficulty of a match for the
officials and appropriate selection resulting from that. It frankly defies belief
that one of the most inexperienced of referees was selected to preside over the
match between Featherstone and Toronto. Anyone who knows anything about the
recent history of matches between Fev and Paul Rowley coached sides would have
known that it was likely to be a hard match to keep under control and required
a strong, experienced referee.
League One
This week we have brought you another
excellent article (Championship Talk) in which Gareth Walker discusses how good
the League One campaign has been so far. It needs to be said in the face of the
Wigan Chairman’s desire to cast adrift these clubs from the professional game.
It just demonstrates to us that this Wigan chairman, along with a previous one,
has no care for the sport of rugby league whatsoever.
That is not to say that there aren’t
reasons to be concerned about some of the clubs in League One. Once upon a time
the work around Hemel Stags was a shining beacon of how to develop rugby league
outside the heartlands. But since becoming professional it seems to have turned
sour. How can you justify having a club that plays under the name of a town in
Hertfordshire but is actually based in Sheffield. After making a decent fist of
it in their first two years their performances have collapsed and the last
three years have seen them in the bottom two and without a single win against
any teams apart from the other expansion teams. In fact in the last two years their
only wins have come against that other basket case, the South Wales
Scorpions/Ironmen/West Wales Raiders. That club’s changes of name, ownership
and location has done nothing to change their appalling failure. This year is
no better. They have only played 4 matches so far but in those they have scored
a pathetic total of just 26 points whilst conceding the massive total of 286
points. That’s an average of more than 70 points per game!
We believe in expansion. Whilst not
setting the world of rugby league alight, North Wales Crusaders, London Skolars
and Coventry Bears are worthy members of the professional game. The problem
seems to me the lack of real consideration as to how to develop professional
clubs outside the heartlands and what to do when the clubs are failures. Maybe
it is time to seriously consider opportunities for promotion and relegation
between League One and the National Conference League.
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