So the ref manufactured the boneheaded strip to give a pen. Then the tackle in the air to give a pen?

Hudds imploded and gave away lots of completely valid and largely blatantly obvious penalties as a result. You can call that lack of integrity by the ref, I prefer to call it a team losing its way

To say the referee's are biased and incompetent is embarassing and shows why other fans call us 'Whino' s'.
We need to fix up are own deficiencies.
From last night looked like a few 50 :50 calls went against us. Does that explain why Lui threw the ball 10 yards behind our whole back line, or Handley showed blatant dissent?
The Mellor try wasn't a try in a million years, so to call the ref biased against us is beyond my ken!

Fully agree

Couldnt agree more. Total nonsense to question Hicks' integrity.

My own pov is watch the "offences" he was giving them 6 again then answer why we didnt get the same calls i.e Hands on the Ball ,Markers not square pushing at the ptb. No consistency whatsoever. He slso rightly penalised Mellor for blocking a kick chase yet ignored the same happening to Cam Smith.
We have some really poor discipline efforts to address but there's more than enough for Hicks to work on as well as his TJ's.

The game is so quick without the scrums and the 6 again rule I found it hard to notice what the 6 again was given for. In a tv game after a penalty has been awarded for an infringement, the game would stop and you would generally get a replay showing what the penalty was for. At least then you had an idea who the offending player was and whether it was justified. At present it is not clear imo. It may become easier to follow after a few weeks of getting used to it. Some of the serial offenders of the past would have maybe gone under the radar had it been in use before.

On a side note, I wish sky would show replays in the corner like the Australian networks do. You miss a lot of the game because of the replays

This is largely my feelings on Hicks performance, very minor things we were getting pinged for, he let go for Hudds, i dont think it was an integrity thing, just think he had a very poor performance to our detriment for most of the game.

Also agree about this...saying the Ref was poor isnt a means to justify our performance, we were shocking too, but it dosnt have to be one or the other, its possible for both the ref and us to be poor in the same game, which happened last night. Imo.

Someone have a word with Sky. When play is underway, especially if we are ten metres from the opposition line, I have no interest in seeing either coach sat in the stands, or the Catalans team standing on the touchline.

Their presentation and commentary was amateur at best yesterday. The main commentator was bloody awful. When you compare to the NRL TV product it’s laughable

Exactly this, at half time I said that undoubtedly we were poor but the number of penalties and restarted counts that went against us were a massive influence as well. Like most refs Hicks decided to level up the count last 20 minutes then all of a sudden Shuddersfield look out on their feet and we got some real momentum.
I've no idea if he is but Ava looked a little overweight to me and Lui is like a racehorse that needs a few runs to reach its peak. Myler took two almighty hits which knocked him off his game and you can be sure that other clubs took note of that.

According to the YEP the penalty count was 10-4 when Handley was sin-binned after 7 straight (penalties) to Shuddersfield. The final count was 10-9. The tackle count restarts ended up 5-5 (3-1 at half time).

Lui is more like a 3 legged rocking horse..

Huddersfield cannot blame Hicks for losing 26-6 lead with 14 minutes to go and us down to 12 men for stupid reason may I add that, Hicks took that completely wrong. we gained momentum and they were shattered, we had more left in the tank because wenwerent firing for the first 60. Their heads then went down and that’s that, we simply stepped up and took the game, that was purely Huddersfield’s to lose. Their big players should have stepped up and managed the last bit of the game. Also the Mellor try, was it or not, it doesn’t matter because he would have sent it up as a try because on a Facebook reply he saw the ball down, I didn’t see it down but sometimes that’s the way it goes, they still should have close the game out regardless!

Who is reffing and how pedantic they are , Child and hicks come to mind is going to have a big impact on individual games and I reckon teams will have to plan for certain refs. What touch judges actually do to help them though is a mystery to me.
Will suit the faster, fitter sides for a few months. A season ending back end of November should mean horrible weather for the playoffs, would have suited our old team. A weird looking fixture list, new rules and bad weather, going to be a strange season, staying injury free will be key for us to give us any chance IMO.