Monday morning before the opening State of Origin battle
for the year is upon us and so too are the same people in the media trying to
tell Todd Greenberg what to do.
Today it’s Phil Rothfield, appealing to Greenberg “to let
the game flow. To instruct the State of Origin I referees to drop the nit-picking
that has turned rugby league into a sometimes boring and stop-start snooze
fest.”
What is boring is Rothfield’s pathetic nit-picking. His
same old stop-start rhetoric is snooze-fest inducing.
More importantly though, Mr Greenberg, I would hate to
see the day that the game is run by whatever some tired, whinging dinosaur in
the media has to say.
It was their complaints after the Sharks v Storm game,
where over 30 penalties were blown and legends Cameron Smith and Luke Lewis
both spent time in the sin bin, which fuelled their attacks on the NRL for
their unbelievable stance of enforcing the rules.
A few weeks later a total of 14 players were sent to the
sin bin in one round, the most in one round in over 20 years.
Not once has any of these detractors employed anything
other than the aggressively stupid and damaging tact of blaming referees. The
players and clubs are committing the acts and deserve to be punished, yet are being let off and now it seems, have Rothfield suggesting they should be allowed to cheat.
What makes Rothfield’s stance today so much more
laughable is the fact he was sooking about referees NOT doing their job
properly last year. Now he’s demanding that they don’t do their job properly in
2018. This is enough evidence alone to prove that this man should never have
his opinions on how the game should be run listened to, let alone considered.
We also know that refs have a history of
being ultra-lenient in Origin games anyway, so there really is no crisis here,
bar the one Rothfield is trying to create.
My message to you though Mr Greenberg is simple.
While your suggestion to #TalkTheGameUp is a good one, we
are facing a different problem here on two fronts. Media attacking match
officials is disgraceful and needs to be addressed, in a firm manner. We all
know referees make mistakes, they are humans after all. But the constant
denigration and the abhorrent insinuations by some commentators that the
referees are trying to get in the spotlight, or the rubbish view of some fans
that they are match fixing and the like, need to end. Be as harsh as you need
to on this.
Because it leads to a bigger issue and my second point.
The message this belittling of referees sends to children. That players are
never at fault, it’s the referees who are to blame. Do we really want a game
where kids are abusing referees? Or a game where no-one wants to be an
official. It’s a hard enough job as it is, they don’t need to cop this verbal
diahorrea from cowards that have never once tried their hand at being an
official at this level.
Thank you.
