Paul Crawley from Fox Sports
Wayne Bennett has unloaded on the overall unfairness in the standard of NRL refereeing and the Bunker, while calling for a dramatic overhaul on punishment for foul play, including a major revamp of the sin bin and send-off rules.
The Dolphins super coach says his frustrations about the standard of officiating has been growing for some time.
But he decided to speak out publicly because he says the current system is not getting better -and is having too big an impact on too many games.
âIf I was a punter I couldnât bet a penny on rugby league at the moment,â the gameâs greatest coach said in an exclusive interview with foxsports.com.au.
âDo I need the grief this will cause? No, I donât.
âBut I have to stand up for the players and the game I have spent my whole life being a part of and loving.
âWe canât hide and pretend it is not a problem because it is a problem.
âAnd it is causing massive frustration, not just with the players and coaches, but the fans.
âPeople always go on about consistency.
âI know how hard consistency is.
âWhat I want is fairness for every team.
âI want to know we are all getting a fair shake out there.â
FOUL PLAY PUNISHMENT A LOTTERY
Every game it seems has different rule interpretations for illegal high contact.
One game you see a player sin binned for a high shot that wouldnât bruise a grape.
Then the following game someone gets clocked good and proper and it doesnât so much as warrant a penalty.
âI will give you an example,â Bennett continued.
âI have had four players in the last two weeks hit with contact to the head by the opposition illegally.
âNot one penalty in those four times.
âBut I have had two of these players taken out of the game on the advice of the independent doctor, who believed that they were concussed and so they were out of the game for 15 minutes.
âSo the doctor, who is the expert, believed they were concussed.
âYet the referee accused one of the players (Herbie Farnworth) that he was milking it.
âWho is the expert here? The referee, the guy in the Bunker, or the doctor?
âIf the doctor believes he has been concussed, how can we leave it up to the referee or Bunker to argue that?
âThat is part of the frustration.
âThen in Wednesday nightâs State of Origin there were two penalties for high tackles. The players affected didnât go to ground, nor were they called from the field for a HIA.
âSo this is where I get confused because in a game played five days before you canât get a penalty for illegal contact to the head. âAnd five days later under the same set of rules they get penalties and the game goes on.â
SO HOW DO WE FIX IT?
âI will go back to my original point,â Bennett said.
âIf someone is hit in the head, unless it is clearly accidental, then that should be a penalty.
âWhat they do after that (in respect to possible suspensions) is their prerogative.
âBut there is a duty of care the game has to its players.
âHave they met some of that? Of course they have.
âBut typical of these people is that they continue to put band aids on situations rather than make the hard decision and getting us all to fall in line with it.â
Bennett says itâs a similar scenario with punishment dished out for players running in to spark a melee.
âIn our game (against the Storm) there is a melee when Tevita Pangia did that good tackle,â Bennett explained.
âHe was offside but it was not an illegal tackle.
âAnd yet a player from the other team raced in and started a melee. Even though we didnât start the melee, no action. No penalty. No sin bin.
âThen you can go back to Origin on Wednesday night, and it was a great example of the frustration I am getting at.
âThere was a melee in the second half and the referee takes no action. But he said, âIf it happens again I will take actionâ.
âSure enough it happened again and he took action.
âMy point here is if he took action in the first place and didnât put the band aid on there wouldnât have been a second melee.
âAnyone who thinks the melee is a good look for the game is kidding themselves.
âSo why do we put up with it?â
BAN THE BIN AND ALLOW A SEND OFF REPLACEMENT
Bennett wants to go two giant steps further by abolishing the sin bin for anything other than professional fouls, while revamping the send-off rule so teams get a replacement player after 10 minutes.
He says the send-off should also cost the offending team three interchanges while the offending player should not return to the game.
âWe canât get the sin bin right because of all the different variations and interpretations,â he said.
âWe played this game for 90-odd years without a sin bin.
âSo letâs just keep it simple and stick to the professional fouls for sin bins, and then let the match review committee take control of the grading and suspensions.â
âAnd now to the send-off.
âIf you go back to the send-off in the first State of Origin, this is what the game has to look at.
âWhat I am saying is the decision (to send off Joseph Suaalii) was right. 100 per cent.
âBut we have no comeback when it leaves one team with 12 men and the game is done.
âThe send-off was created in 1908.
âThere were T Model Fords in 1908.
âWe still have cars today. But, geez, the cars have changed enormously.
âYet we still have the same send-off.
âWe are asking fans to pay $300 to go to a State of Origin game.
âIf I am paying $300 and I am going to take my family and it costs well over $1000, and I know the game is over in 7 minutes, we have got to be better than that.
âIt is a discussion we need to have.
âI am not trying to belt anyone up.
âI just want to be constructive.
âI want to be honest and tell what is really happening out there.
âThe kickback is always that you have to send players off or otherwise they will be doing this or doing that (to illegally rub out the best players).
âBut the AFL have never sent a player off in their history.
âThey have had tough men. They have great players. They have all survived with no sent off players.
âAm I saying we do that, not necessarily.
âBut we have to look at what we can do. And donât use the excuse they will just be taking out the best players.
âThere were times in our game when players got rubbed out for two years (for foul play) because the game was brutal on foul play.
âThe bosses at the time brought Jim Comans in to clean up the game and there is still nothing to stop us doing that.
âHigh profile players have always been targeted. The great Wally Lewis. Allan Langers. Andrew Johns. Brad Fittlers.
âYou donât think they were singled out as well?
âBut the answer is heavier penalties post-match. We need to have a mature discussion about the send-off and the sin bin.
âI have not spoken to other coaches about this, but I am sure they would share the same frustrations.
âIt is a great competition.
âThe salary cap is working.
âIt is also why it is so important to get the officiating right.
âI have no doubt they are saying to themselves in there at the NRL, âHere comes Bennett again, whingingâ.
âBut no one rings me up from the NRL.
âNobody says to me that âwe have reviewed the performance of the referee and Bunker and it wasnât where it should beâ.
âI have got to question them.
âThey have a responsibility much greater than not to be having a whinge about me because I am unhappy or disappointed about the way a game was officiated.
âBut I am the bad guy because I am making a complaint.
âI make the complaint because I care about my players.
âI donât want to see them get hit in the head illegally, we all understand the consequences of that. The head is a no-go zone.
âI donât want my players copping poor decisions.
âI owe it to them.
âI ask them to go out there and play to the rules and we judge them on their performance.
âAnd I feel like I have let them down if I donât question when I know the decisions are wrong.
âIn our last game they got four decisions wrong which they admit to, and we should have got four penalties. We got none.
âAm I saying drop the ref? No, I am not.
âWe have players that have bad games.
âBut we have to be better.
âEveryone thought the Bunker was going to be the saviour of the game.
âThe Bunker has made it worse because they have hindsight and time on their hands, and they still canât get it right.
âI think the answer is more accountability, better training for the Bunker, and less people in the refereeâs ears when he is referring the game.
âBecause right now he has a coach, two sideline officials and a Bunker person who have access to him.
âI couldnât imagine sending my player into a game with all that information being fed to him why he is trying to do his job.
âAm I against talking to the referee? No, I am not.
âBut it should only be in a break of play and the refereesâ coach should have the same rule on him as we do on our players.
âA message can be taken out in a break of play and then we all move on.
âWe canât just sit back and continue to let this happen.
âItâs not just me disgruntled by this.
âIt is other coaches, players and most importantly the fans who pay their hard-earned money to support our game.
âWe canât just continue to fob it off and say, âHe is whinging againâ. And we canât say the fans are whingers too.â
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I donât think I like the idea of relying entirely on post-game punishments and cutting back on sin bins.
Bennett wants to go two giant steps further by abolishing the sin bin for anything other than professional fouls, while revamping the send-off rule so teams get a replacement player after 10 minutes.
the answer is heavier penalties post-match. We need to have a mature discussion about the send-off and the sin bin.
If anything, I think the problem here is with them being too reticent to sin bin people. There were multiple occasions in this weekâs Origin game where sin bins could have been used, but werenât. And the one time it was used, there was such a transparently obvious attempt to âboth sidesâ the issue. In that game specifically it was part of a bigger problem that Bennett doesnât address with refs obviously being told to try and equal up the series to make game 3 a decider, but even more generally, the problem is with inconsistency of using the sin bin and send off, and the answer is not to get rid of sin bins. I worry that if the penalty isnât immediate (in the form of an immediate sin bin), too often players will think itâs worth the risk of missing a game or two, if it takes out the opponentâs best player.
Other than that though, I think Bennett raises a lot of good points here. They need consistency, and they need a greater focus on player safety. And most of all they need to acknowledge that there are serious deep-rooted issues with how reffing is done.
Also, IIRC one of the key points for introducing the sin bin was to penalize foul play and make it easier for refs to apply it because everyone was too scared to send someone off, and everyone whinged that having 12 players for all or most of the match was too harsh.
Iâm for sendoffs and sin bins. If those arenât in place you are going to have professional hit men out there to take out the opponents best players. And their team will get the 2 points, or they win the GF or SoO then they get suspended.
Consistency is whatâs needed. And you see the lack of it in plenty of decisions, sometimes even within the same game.
Overall, I like the review system and challenge system. There are plenty of sports where itâs an absolute shitshow. EPL and NBA come to mind. The issue is only around consistency of decisions.
