Bullseye wrote:
As Toovey said at the forum the reffing might not be very good but many of the refs are inexperienced and thrust into the spotlight far too early. Often they're way out of their depth. The Dewsbury away match where Keyes was taken out and Thomas assaulted being a case in point.
We're so low on confidence that anything that goes against us is a trigger for heads to drop. It's the losing culture that's to blame.
There is absolutely a crisis in RL reffing in this country. Rugby League World mag published a good article about a few months back, and while it never properly touched on the rumours that have dogged some of the premature retirees from the reffing world, what was eye opening were the comments about people being fast tracked.
I think until a ref gets to Championship level, nobody from the RFL looks at your performance, so any analysis was done by the ref themselves. Jamie Bloem said one of the reasons he quit being a ref was that quite often he saw vastly under qualified people being fast tracked up the leagues because they hadn't admitted any mistakes in their post match debriefs. Bloem himself would have said "Oh I messed up here, but here is a reason why" and then he'd get punished for it which is surely counter intuitive to the learning process. Personally I think that is bordering on scandalous if true.
Anyway, totally agree. The phrase "losing culture" is a good one, and what I saw yesterday were all the hallmarks of a side that was deep in one.
