Quote: bramleyrhino "I really don't think it's that much of a problem as is made out.
Lots of people on here look at penalty counts as a stick with which to beat referees. If a penalty count is skewed, it must be because a ref is favouring a team, right?
The better teams tend to end up on the right side of a penalty count not because the referee has a bias, but because the better teams are usually stronger, faster, better disciplined and smarter - attributes that naturally force opponents into making mistakes.
Catalans make this complaint a lot, yet watch some of their games and tell me that there poor disciplinary record isn't fully deserved.'"
I agree to an extent that better teams can generate penalties against the opposition, what is a better test is when you see a couple of average teams and one side gets a particularly rough ride, something I've seen more than my fair share of. And it's not always about the number of penalties, it can be around the distribution. Getting the benefit of 5 penalties in the last 5 minutes when your 20 points down might even the count but it doesn't have the same impact as getting them when you're still in contention, same with refs who start clamping down on persistent offside in the last 10 mins of a game, or wise up to borderline smart tactics long after the game has gone as a contest.
When I first came to London and started watching the Broncos regularly as a neutral it was quite an eye opener, I'd been used to Knowsley Road where the pop gave most of the forward pass decisions, and it wasn't just the 50/50 calls that went against the home side, the sense of injustice is one of the things that actually hooked me. My suspicion was that the parochialism that is present in much of RL's fan base, and in not a few administrators didn't magically stop when it got to officials. About ten years ago now a played in an amateur game at South London where the ref was a former SL official, a northerner, he was passionate about the idea of expansion and was happy to drive stupid distances to ref amaterur games in London. In the bar afterwards he told us of the night before a Broncos game a few years before when a well known former ref (whose name I won't mention) called his team of officials together and told them that he wasn't "going to give the Broncos anything tomorrow" and to bear it in mind.
Now the anecdote above is an extreme case, but London and Catalans are seen as outsiders to a part of British RL, it's foolish to even deny it. And even if officials do try to keep their entirely human biases in check it's difficult because certain things will always be in the back of the mind. In the early years of SL my Dad always used to moan about the Broncos playing like an Australian team, not because they were particularly dirty but because they played a physical game and not the "British" style. Around the same period he had it in for Leeds who were arguably played a far more dubious style with the likes of Newton, Barrie M, Morley and Fleary taking it in turns to push the boundaries of acceptable conduct, but London were outsiders and Leeds weren't. These days London are no longer a threat to anybody but themselves, but Catalans are, and I think that means their physical style will attract more attention than it would if they were another club.
