We made such a hash of some of ours that it looked like we were playing it when in fact we were just putting the ball on the ground in the most uncoordinated way possible. Thus when we actually did play the ball the Widnes defence was about 5 metres away. Obviously the ref should have blown up but he was obviously interested in something else that was going on.

On our conditioning it was obvious that our frontrowers (Sidlow, Manoakafoa and Fakir) were lacking fitness. Their running was slow and lateral in many cases and lacked any decent footwork. Offloads weren’t very common and often when they did come were very risky. Getting an offload again is a lot down to strength and fitness to be able to dominate the collision, shake off the tackler and get the arms free. It’s not something we’ve been good at since our pack started to decrease in size.

Anyway on Mr Hicks I’ve seen far worse refs and far better. He wasn’t all that bad apart from my PTB bugbear but he’s not alone there are we hardly help ourselves in this situation.

Agree with the last bit especially.

What was the old saying? "the lord helps he who helps himself", iirc, and we didn't. Widnes took what Hicks was prepared to give, whilst at times, we seemed to be jumping off as though it was Silverwood there with a stopwatch and we were playing St Helens.

Hicks was letting lying on go, he didn't police the offside at the ptb either but we didn't take what was on offer - well not until very late in the game and I suspect that was just us getting tired, if I'm honest.

The other thing is, IF a ref really is failing to police the 10, letting lying on go etc., then this still has NO effect on the ability of either team to beat each other, because it's the old "same for both sides" story.

If you accept that a ref is as palpably blind to (say) holding down as some claim, then this should be obvious at least equally to all players as it is to these fans, so unless they are all stupid and their coach blind, they could and should get away with just the same.

But then many rabid supporters would just change tack to conspiracism, i.e. "yes, but he was only not watching one side"

Widnes found it easier against our offside players than we did against theres ☺

behind it. You're absolutely spot that it makes no difference to the result though; it's how teams play, or how teams make the most from those foibles, that decides the result, not the referees.

I agree, Bulliac - but always thought that the teams, of all people, must surely know the likely peccadilloes of each of the refs and coach their teams to play accordingly when a given ref is up? Wouldn't this just be part and parcel of proper preparation?

What is said at latest refs meeting if it is an aspect to be specifically policed is always now communicated to the clubs so they would know of any change in emphasis.

Exactly. Perhaps the more successful teams are successful partly because they prepare better (except Wigan who cheat)?
In response to Bulliac, I guess each ref has his own black list because they are all different people.

Oh, of course they are TT. They're all individuals with their own minds,foibles and prejudices - just like the rest of us really. My only real quibble with that is that they have a controller who is supposed [in so much as it's actually possible to 'iron out' differences in interpretation and the way the laws of the game are applied but, whatever he does doesn't seem very effective though, again I'd accept that trying to do so is, to some extent, like knitting fog or counting sheep on a Yorkshire moor.