At the risk of stating the obvious, the problem that the RFL have - quite likely of their own making - is the number of officials who have left (or been pushed) over the past 12-18 months.

Without bothering to trawl back for an exact list, they've managed to (for want of a better word) 'lose' something like 8-10 officials during that period. The result has been that - at every level - officials who are not ready are being fast-tracked to a level that they really shouldn't be officiating

You'd have to think that an organisation that manages to lose such a large number of its employees over such a short space of time needs to look hard at itself! There have been many hints on social media that something is really, really wrong with culture amongst the refs department. Actual accusations are never quite made, presumably for legal reasons - but something appears to be amiss, and it's cascading down to our level with some of the referees we now end up with.

Those accusations were made in League Weekly by a couple of former referees I believe. It was a very very eye-opening piece and explained why at least a few of those officials left. It certainly didn't paint former ref boss Jon Sharp in a good light, and ex referees I believe have since come out and said the current boss hasn't done a lot to address it, even though he himself insists things have improved.

Magrin, Walshaw and Ollett all get one match bans.

One match for Walshaw, yet we lose Keyes for two. Good stuff.

So that's another prop out for us in a must win game against Rochdale Hopefully Oledzki is back this week!

This is a massive point. I deal with referees on a weekly basis for all our home games. I am seeing referees who have not been great at our level in the conference getting fast tracked into the championship and it's worrying. Liam Moore being a prime example, a couple of years ago he put a complaint in that one of our players give him some verbals after the final whistle, and this player had a beard and this player was definitely Dave Halley. So Dave gets dragged to a meeting witht he head of referees at the club. All the while every man and his dog knows Dave cant grow a single hair on his chin! Yet he ends up reffing big games in the championship.

The point im making is these guys are nowhere near ready. The week before last we had Geoffrey Poumes who is French and I have seen in pictures full time training with the super league referees. He did not even know what the score of the game was. Everyone was coming to me and Saddleworths secretary for updated scores. Nice guy but if he is to be one of our full time refs god help us all

When you look at the turnover of referees at the top end of the game there's obviously something wrong. It's not just experienced ones leaving either. It does not bode well at all. Will the RFL do something about it? Of course not.

Standard RFL procedure for dealing with anything. Bury heads in sand.

I'm sure this has been asked before but here goes: If the refs think they are being let down by the RFL, the clubs and the fans think the RFL are letting the game down, how the hell are these guys still in post?

If it's true that Wood is leaving his post then maybe he's realised the state the game is in and is getting out before the sh*t hits the fan.

The RFL will obviously come up with fail safe solution to this problem.
They will ban any poor performance refs for 12 games and fine them.
Then when they realise that solution will not work, they will set criteria for new refs which is totally unrealistic,
e.g. new refs must start with a 12 game ban, and must be self funded for 3 years.
Except if you are a mate of fat nige's then he will change the rules next season to help you.
Good old RFL