Under Pressure

Forgive me blogosphere, for it has been a while since my last rant. Well over a month in fact, poor form when you're just starting out.

And what an eventful month it has been. The Wallabies have lost... and lost... and lost... and lost some more. My beloved Raiders have been consistently inconsistent to the point where the combined scoresheet from our last matches with all the top 4 teams reads 3 wins, 1 loss with 104 points scored and 79 conceded, while our last matches against the bottom 3 teams reads 0 wins, 3 losses with 46 points scored and 86 conceded. And, of course, we lost the Ashes.

Also over the last month, in a victory for people power, I compiled stats showing how the Raiders were not getting their fair share of free-to-air TV coverage, stats that were picked up and written about by The Canberra Times and Rugby League Week, and talked about on ABC Grandstand in an interview with NRL CEO David Gallop. Oh come on, allow me a little smugness about that one.

So then why, with no shortage of topics to talk about, would I come back to the exact same topic that I blogged about over a month ago? Because of two words: Phil Haines.

Now, I like Phil Haines as a referee. He has shown enormous promise in his (very) short career so far. One thing that is certain is that he doesn't shirk away from making the big calls. Unfortunately, as we all now know, this is also his weakness. His decision to send off Luke Douglas was a rookie mistake, and had it been at a lower level of the game it may have been accepted as one of those things. But this is the NRL, and like it or not the NRL is big business. Fans spend hundreds - if not thousands - of dollars every year in the name of supporting their team. Betting agencies turn over millions of dollars in wagers every week. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

What I'm trying to get at here is that, with so many stakeholders having a financial interest in results, referees are going to be placed under the microscope for every decision they make. This is why, even allowing for his inexperience, cracking under pressure the way Haines did last weekend is not tolerated. It can well be argued that Cronulla lost that game against Manly simply because of this decision (not to mention the countless baffling ones that followed it), and that has an enormous effect on all the things I mentioned previously.

I suppose you could argue that with the introduction of the two referee system this year we had to suddenly find another 8-10 referees for the first grade pool, many of whom would have spent a few more years fine-tuning their trade in the lower grades but for the change. Whilst there is some validity to this argument, Robert Finch doesn't get paid to make excuses. He gets paid to ensure that every referee who goes out onto the paddock each weekend is fully prepared and able to handle the pressure and intensity of first grade rugby league. Increasingly, we are seeing that Robert Finch simply is not doing his job. Week after week we see referees making basic errors in law, and it's simply not good enough.

This raises the question: who is Robert Finch accountable to? What are the measures of whether he has done a good job or not? Does he have any KPI's that he needs to meet? I believe we, the fans, have a right to know this sort of information. And given my little victory with my free-to-air statistics, something I will undertake to find out.

Watch this space.