I thought Hicks was poor and don't buy in to the "at least he was consistent" stuff.

The problem in super league is that players get used to relying on penalties to score a try. When the internationals come around at the end of the season, the referees (even the UK ones) completely change the rules and the benchmark for a penalty becomes much higher. The Super League players struggle because they have been conditioned to rely on penalties to score tries, and have not been conditioned to be patient and go set for set for 10 minutes waiting for an opportunity.

Hicks blowing his whistle every 2 minutes, not only results in a frustrating game for the fans but also serves to harm our international prospects at club and country level.

As someone has already pointed out, the Brisbane NRL game had 7 penalties in it which is about the same as Hicks gave in the first 15 minutes.

It was noticeable that Silverwood followed a similar policy in the Wire v Wakefield game last week - i do wonder if the referees are having their usual early season clamp down on the back of some edict from Ganson/Sharp/Cummings etc which has blighted previous seasons too.

The sooner referees just let the players get on with it and apply some commonsense to their decisions, the better.

Or alternatively, Currie got himself binned while Murdoch-Masila was smart enough not to react.

If it hadn't been for Carney's stupidity, you would have been a man short for ten minutes. Who knows how that would have changed the game.