tvoc wrote:
The St Helens knock on appeared a bad miss from the officials, although anyone suggesting the video referee should intervene without being asked to do so is on dodgy ground.
The forward pass for St Helens first try was contentious but not as contentious for me as the illegal play the ball by Wheeler. He clearly played it forward then stepped over it, I've seen plenty of those rightly brought back by the officials.
In support of Childs I thought he had a very good game overall. Even though I don't like to see referees ping teams while in possession (that's too Union for my tastes) and Child is the worst offender in my book (although Ganson was out to retake the crown on Friday) the one where he penalised McCarthy-Scarsbrook was unavoidable. He specifically warned him at every play the ball up to that point and issued a final warning (all on the run) and the dumb **** took no notice of the officials instruction whatsoever. He did after that though.
Now, I saw it the other way around a little, because while you are correct about Wheeler stepping over the ball he did touch it with his foot (just) and I am not sure it went forward or back. But I agree that more often than not he would have been pinged.
Agree on McCarthy-Scarsbrook though, no choice.
The other interesting thing I noticed, and brings us back to our chat about the RFL actually making public the video ref guidance notes, was that Child went straight to the video for the Saints foot in touch no-try. The touch judge put his flag up and stood his ground, yet Child said, let the video ref have another look. Now, I don't have a problem with this, the video ref is there and it was a reasonably close call so why not? However, if the video ref had not been there Child would have had no choice but to disallow the try, as the rules are clear and the ref has to go with his touch judges decision. The touch judge was spot on in his call and he was in touch.
So this is one area where we have a conflict between the rules and the popular understanding of the video ref's role. If we had access to some strict guidance notes and they said something like (for this instance), 'when a video ref is present, unless the both the ref and touch judge are certain (beyond doubt) that a player was in touch during a try scoring move, they should always refer the decision to the video ref to judge on'. This also means that if either of them are uncertain they have to go to the video; it is of course usually the case that ref is uncertain with the touch judge certain, than the other-way around, as it was in this case. Strictly speaking, if you look at the actual rules, Child should just believe his touch judge and rule 'in-touch'.