Justin Carney being a regular offender; Hicks warned him twice, but took no action.

I've argued before that the side in possession often really push their luck at p-t-bs. They steal three or four yards, and if the markers attempt to stand up to this cheating, then they themselves are pinged for 'crowding'! Carney is indeed a serial offender, one of the worst. But Wigan do it, all teams do it.

Current refereeing interpretation for this appears to be that as long as it doesn't take the markers out of the game, all the attacking side are doing is shortening the ten metres and thereby disadvantaging themselves.

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.

So which penalties is it "commonsense" to ignore, out of interest?

When one of these obvious penalties gets ignored and your team is disadvantaged as a result, can we rely on you not to be whinging about the decision?

I'd argue that being too stupid to learn and adapt to game situations is also harming our prospects at international level. It was obvious from the first 20 minutes how Hicks was refereeing the game, yet certain players - experienced professionals, in some cases players on the verge of international honours - were too intent on playing the big I am rather than adapting to the clear standards that had been set.

It's always much easier to blame the referee than to address the behaviour of the players. In some cases it may be justified - Alibert's inability to watch the right incident as VR last week for example - but in most cases if a penalty is given it's because a player has done something he knows he shouldn't be doing.

The main one would be the marginal holding down decisions that made up a majority of the penalties and led to the game descending in to touch and pass. Again, it's unhelpful to have this interpretation now and then have a completely different one in big games/internationals (and even the second half!!).

Put us on a team warning after far less number of penalties. Inconsistent.

Sin-binned Carney for a palm in the face of Sims, yet the same ref only penalised Pritchard last week for doing exactly the same thing!

Wasn't that Bentham?

Wow. That was not a try.

More obstruction than the Cas disallowed try last week and less downward pressure than Ryan Shaw for Hull KR, also disallowed.

But hey it's Leeds so got to give it!

And how the hell is that a penalty?

100% try. Belt up.

Surely there's a difference between downward pressure of fingers on a ball and downward pressure of the ball on the ground - and the latter is required?