As you know, I'm not Leigh's biggest fan but regarding George - I hear ya!!

We had a spate of refereeing performances from George at home which were quite frankly disgraceful. He seemed to revel in being an "away ref". We've not had him for ages. Thank God.

London 'milked a few' like trying to play the ball within half a second of being tackled and a Leigh player on their back.....PENALTY !!

Don't speak to soon , you'll probably get him next week.

The simple fact is, that on most occasions in the 1st half we gave Stokes the opportunity to penalise us, one of the worst 40 I have seen from Leigh in many a year.

On the positive side we won that gave by playing about 10 mins in the 80 - the rest was woeful. We don't have to be world beaters at this stage, play discipline and structured and we would win most champ games at a canter (no disrespect to the other teams).

I'm willing to wager that, by the end of the 80, he'd penalised London as much as us, for 'technical' offences. What puzzles me (to put it mildly!) is that one team picked up two 'team warnings' resulting in pretty quick sin-binnings, while the other team picked up none?!

Also, it's fine for a ref to take the defending team back 15 metres, and for them to be three metres in front of him, but when he only goes back 6-7 metres and they are still three metres in front of him......!

I'm afraid that, if you are an afficionado of free flowing rugby, you won't get it with him dishing out penalties like there's no tomorrow. If he reffed a SL game like that - and he is a full time official - it would probably be the last one he did ref.

It was painful to watch in the first half with Ginger George being so whistle happy but how God awfully dumb are our players that they continued lying on and leaving hands in the ruck after the first couple had been given?



I would think the reason for our team warnings and subsequent sin bins was that our offences were almost one after the other whereas at least London managed to go a couple of sets in between conceding penalties!

Gareth Hock made a perfectly legal hard shot on one of their players and Bussey was straight in Stokes face complaining and George blew without even seeing it. He couldn't have because Hock was blocking his view. No swinging arms. That is bad, no very bad officiating. That and the complete one sided way he interpreted the rules was a disgrace. Players can't help getting wound up when things get so one sided but they need to be bigger and better than some of the daft penalties. They should have clicked early on and kept their noses clean. Stokes should get dropped a league now as he lost todays game and it was only due to the fantastic spirit from both sets of players and the way they played the game that it didn't become a brawl because with fools like George Stokes reffing that's how it usually ends up. We took a play the ball today after being held up over the line and he called for the ball to be played with - not most - all the Broncos players at least two yards in front of their line.
The man's a BUFFOON.

I remember that, he penalised us 30 seconds after that 'shoulder tackle' happened. Leigh & Stokes have history, and he was back with a vengeance today (in the 1st half)

Well said, I am not sure how they kept their cool as I would have been furious with the torrent of decisions that went against us in the 1st half. We seem to be able to keep our tempers much better than we did at times last season.

10 penalties in a row is beyond anything I have ever seen, we just couldn't get hold of the ball for love nor money. With less than 20 minutes to go and 14 points down I really couldn't see how we were going to get out of that one.

London were in complete control of that game for over an hour. We took control for 5 minutes, scored 18 points and then did what they couldn't by closing it out.

One of the most annoying things about Stokes is his inconsistency, everyone is slightly offside all game then all of a sudden he blows a penalty for it and gets it in his head so there's back to back penalties for being offside before it gets forgotten about again for the rest of the game. He always does this thinks "Oh I've just given a penalty against Leigh, they're slightly offside/slow to get up/ whatever, no worse than anyone else has been all game but I've just given a penalty against them so I must give another!" Repeat until team warning & sin bin then forget all about it & go back to ignoring the marginal offence that's just got a player sin binned. Honestly Stokes is one who's stealing a living from the RFL, been to watch Miners a few times last year and the quality of referees in the NCL is miles better than any game I've ever seen Stokes ref. The RFL needs to look at how it appoints refs as there's so much talent going to waste while the usual culprits ruin game after game after game.

A very poor showing by the ref (particularly in the first 40)who was incredibly inconsistent in his decision making and became the main factor in how the game flowed.

Hopefully Ganson will watch the match video and then feedback to the ref on some of those inconsistencies so he can eradicate them from his officiating.