Quote: tigertot "As soon as I saw Child was reffing I knew there would be the usual pathetic onslaught of criticism, so I watched his performance very carefully. I did miss bits of the second half in a constant battle for the remote control to watch the Olympics, so apologies if every supposed bad decision was during that time. From the game I saw there was only one decision that wasn't 50/50 that he missed. He didn't penalise Lulia for his vicious attack to to Taylor's head in the process of him scoring his try. If Taylor had gone down there rather than scoring then Lulia would have been off. Credit to Taylor for making nothing of it. Apart from that I didn't see anything, that in the modern game when literally hundreds of passes are line balls, couldn't have gone either way, consequently alienating half the crowd (& the hundreds of thousands of KR fans stuck on the motorways). As it was he let plenty go but pulled the obvious ones or those when he obviously got a call from his assistants. The current trend to attack refs after virtually every performance is the worst part of games, with posters trying to outdo each other with ludicrous hyperbole. WTF would want to take up the occupation when you are subject moronic abuse every week, on the pitch & on here? I would love it, love it, if any of the ignorant numpties screaming for justice on here were given just 10 minutes to ref a pro game, I would give a fortune to watch it.'"
Well said. Interestingly, the only coach I've ever talked to who wouldn't criticise a referee either in public or privately was Ross Strudwick, who happened to be a qualified ref himself. He reckoned the job was difficult enough without having to put up with criticism from people who'd never done it and this was in the part-time era when the game was far slower than it is now.