Why impartial referees are required for all international rugby league matches
It comes after additional controversy over the World Club Challenge held over the weekend.
Not only is the debate on refereeing in Australia’s media ludicrous and repeated after Penrith and Wigan’s World Club Challenge, but it also varies widely.
The WCC referee, Liam Moore, was the target of potshots from nearly all former Penrith Panthers players participating in rugby league media. This ploy was duly picked up by the vast majority of a wholly unoriginal Australian rugby league press.
Unfortunately, this fantastic match followed the typical pattern whereby any Australian rugby league loss is instantly criticized for alleged forward passes, alleged bias in the referees, uncalled off-sides, inadequate groundings, and unjudiciated knock-ons.
It serves as a reminder that, of all the main Australian sports, rugby league has the most sophisticated ability to sabotage any momentous occasion through its media coverage, which in this nation is invariably unfavorable and antagonistic toward the international game in general. Of course, an equally toxic social media environment makes this worse.
Because it was founded in 1895, rugby league has been a prominent sport in England, whether Australians want to admit it or not (yes, I am one). Few sports in the world can match the stats of the English rugby league.
Few sports in England (or elsewhere) can claim to have drawn crowds of up to 120,000 for a single game and 6,867,189 for the entire season.
To be honest, only soccer in England can match or surpass these numbers. These straightforward facts highlight how important rugby league is to many English people on a cultural level. (A total of 30 million English people watched the Rugby League World Cup in 2022).
Wigan is a globally renowned rugby league team. For those who were around when it happened, Penrith is known for having one of the greatest rugby league records: eight straight Challenge Cup Final victories at London’s Wembley Stadium from 1988 to 1995.
Only St. George’s eleven consecutive premiership victories (1956–1966) and Queensland’s eight consecutive series victories (2006–2013) over New South Wales during the State of Origin era really match this feat in the elite rugby league.
Prior to this, the inter-state rugby league between Queensland and New South Wales was nearly fatally flawed due to the unfair selection criteria, which favored NSW due to the relative strength of the Sydney competition.
In the rugby league world, Wigan is well deserving of respect based just on their record.
Rugby league as a whole suffers greatly from the Australian media’s blatant disregard for British rugby league in general.
The fact that the English rugby league competition has occasionally been the finest in the world and, as such, is worthy of respect, as are the clubs within it, doesn’t matter whether the Super League is currently as competitive as the NRL.
It can be inferred from the post-WCC conversation that Australian media spectators find it objectionable that an English referee is chosen to officiate a match between an English team and an Australian squad. This essentially leaves us with just two choices: either a neutral referee or an Australian referee.
In order to guarantee that Australian referees oversee all significant international matches, the first option smacks of further rewarding the Australian rugby league (just take a look at Ashley Klein’s incredible selections to officiate the World Cup Finals in 2017 and 2022, even though Australia was competing in both competitions).
This is blatantly unjust. The second choice—an impartial referee—is a good one, and I have previously supported it.
The fracas in the media over the use of an English referee here highlights the significance of referee neutrality in international sport.
To put it briefly, impartial referees make sure that justice is served by minimizing partiality and, more significantly, that it is perceived as such. The perceived fairness of any given international rugby league event is significantly impacted by this.
This is the reason why the loud Australian media narrative surrounding WCC refereeing right now is so at odds with their recent, earlier mindset.
Australia gained a great deal from the decision to forgo using a neutral referee in the 2022 World Cup Final, which occurred just over a year ago. It should be noted that the absence of a neutral referee in a match like this goes against every other major team sport in the world as well as past international rugby league practice (see, for example, the use of neutral referees in the Rugby League World Cup Finals in 1988 and 1992).
An Australian referee’s very controversial decision to not send off Australia’s Angus Crichton in the 2022 World Cup Final versus Samoa negatively affected the game at the time and basically terminated Samoa’s chances of winning. The optics of this were bad for rugby league, to put it objectively.
Unsurprisingly, not much was said about the officiating problem in the Australian media, even after the Samoan coach brought it up after the game.
In the end, Australia emerged victorious in the match. The same media gave little to no thought to the timing of this pivotal decision in relation to the game and the clear negative implication that an Australian official made a controversial call that might be interpreted as favoring the Australian team in a two-horse race.
The Australian rugby league media can’t have it both ways anymore. Either the sport returns to using neutral referees for all major international matches and sticks with it, or else we’ll always have to deal with the inevitable solitary media coverage of referee selection and lineball decisions for a very long time.
Selecting the former will enable more uniformity and respect for choices made at the international level; sticking with the latter will undoubtedly result in more rugby league players discounting key events and in some localized squabbling over decisions made on the field.
