Apparently, the NRL and their refs are biased against the Warriors, recent evidence arriving while the team scored a total of one try in a couple of defeats by two superior sides.
A missed call here, a little inconsistency there, and voila. Six points in 160 minutes of league. Don’t blame the extensive injury list, the arduous schedule, the fact the latest loss came against the two-time reigning premiers. Blame the refs.
The refs are repeatedly ruling against the Warriors because ... the NRL want the club to fail because..they’d rather not engage a potentially massive fanbase because ... they want fewer customers and less money? I dunno, maybe there’s a simpler explanation.
2. Refs make mistakes
Look at that, we found a simpler explanation. Refs make mistakes for the same reason players make mistakes: high-performance sport is complex and unpredictable, unfolding quickly with countless moving parts, draining both physically and mentally.
If referees’ mistakes happen to be more beneficial to one side, it doesn’t mean they have “money on them to lose”. Just like if one set of players make more mistakes than their opponents, it doesn’t mean there has been “cheating of the highest order”.
Only an unhinged person would suggest as much. So why level that accusation at referees?
It’s because they’re an easy target. (Refs, if you’re reading, skip this next part.) No one likes refs. I don’t like refs; it pains me to write this weirdly impassioned defence.
And since they’re an easy target, when a team suffer a bad result, or three straight bad results to darken what had been a rarely optimistic mood, it’s easy for coaches and fans to whine about those with the whistle.
Truth is, refs screw up for plenty of non-corrupt reasons. But crying foul over disputed fouls is a basic way to avoid examining other causes behind a season suddenly going in the wrong direction.
3. We need them (for now)
We’ll get to that ominous parenthetical, but right now we need refs, flaws and all, and we should, he reluctantly tells himself, pay more credit to their part in something like sport that brings us such joy.
It’s an old axiom that when we don’t notice referees, they’ve probably had a good game. And that’s naturally allied to a lack of praise, as if an excellently anonymous performance is the bare minimum we expect and accept.
But perhaps we should be more grateful for their quiet control over proceedings. After all, think about how unseemly sport can become when that control is lost.
We *heavy sigh* need rules. And we need officials to implement those rules, to help a game flow on a level playing field and ensure all those aggressive-bastard athletes maintain a modicum of discipline.
Sportspeople are always pushing the boundaries to breaking point — that’s what makes them great. But imagine their behaviour with less officious officiating. The thought just made Steve Smith start rubbing his sandpaper together with glee.
4. Won’t somebody please think of the children
Moralising about athletes as role models is generally tedious. But I’ll stop the eye-rolling long enough to acknowledge that kids can, theoretically, model the behaviour of those in roles they admire, such as athletes.
So it makes sense that if young Jimothée sees his favourite sportsman launch a verbal spray at a referee on Friday night, the little shit might be inclined to repeat it on Saturday morning.
It’s a vicious cycle and one in which refs are always the losers. Some people, otherwise kind and empathetic people, might not worry that refs are losers. But refs being losers doesn’t exactly assist with the facilitation of sport.
The vast majority of refs aren’t doing it for fame and fortune. (What exactly they are doing it for remains unclear. I don’t wanna kinkshame.) But that’s especially true at amateur and youth level, where ungrateful idiots like me should respect a ref taking time out of their weekend to help everyone else have fun.
5. The fulltime whistle is near
All right, that’s enough respect for one column. We should stop whining about refs because they’re becoming obsolete and there’s no cause to kick ‘em on the way out.
Line calls can now be automatic in tennis, and robot umpires have been successfully deployed at the minor-league level in baseball. As painful as VAR can make football, that line-drawing genie ain’t going back in the bottle.
Technology is inexorably marching in one direction and further advances in sport officiating will follow.
So, be nice to refs, while they’re still around. As a member of another industry waiting to be subsumed by artificial intelligence, I stand in solidarity with my replaceable brothers and sisters.
