Russell Smith bent over for the Aussies on more than one occasion , and ended up reffing , and living over there .

A lot of the uk refs seem to give the benefit of the doubt to NRL teams. It’s either sucking up to big brother or some ill judged effort to be deemed impartial

Whereas their refs are openly biased and don't care

Steve Presley
Stuart Cummings
Karl Kirkpatrick
Ian Smith
Steve Ganson

were my top 5

How anyone other than Saints fans could put Stuart Cummings in the top 5 is beyond me.

He was indescribably awful. Biased or just plain incompetent? Take your pick. It doesn't matter. The only ref I can remember whose arrogant poppinjay attitude to his own poor performances saw him get attacked on the field (not that I applaud that incident, but it shows how much annoyance he'd caused).

Some embarrassing comments on this thread. If you think every single match official you have ever seen is poor then I'd invite you to consider that either:
A - You don't fully understand the intricacies of the rules, or how the officials work together (and with the players) to enforce them.
OR
B - Your expectations are beyond what hundreds of men over decades of rugby games have tried their best to deliver, and therefore basically impossible.
I'd suggest for 99% of fans it's A. You don't understand, but somehow feel qualified to criticise anyway. I wonder why we struggle to attract match officials.

Unlike yourself?

"The reason it looks better and faster is because the Referee's in the NRL, ignore many of the things which our Referees blow up for and allow the game to flow!"

More U turns than Dominic Cummings

Those were before my time but my Aussie mate has plenty of stories about Greg Hartley keeping getting appointed to big games and making controversial decisions that helped Manly. At the time Manly were the cashed up team that everyone hated and thought had too much influence over the game.

The other controversial one was the ref they called The Grasshopper who reffed a number of Origin games and NSW fans thought he was against them.

Jack Gibson at Eels certainly did not get on with Hartley (see Aussie R.L . History on u tube)

I'd imagine there are actually quite a few people who could do a better job of administering British RL than the RFL have done over the years.

Did not do so bad when Uncle Mo was in charge.

The introduction of the Super League, Summer Rugby, not to mention the Sky Contract!

Some people have short memories or are to young to remember.

Have a search on YouTube for a documentary called "The Fibros and the The Silvertails"
Really good Documentary - Certainly touches on how the game in OZ (And the UK) was in the mid 70's and what the Aussies did to change it around and why.
And probably we were 10years behind in doing it

Barry Gomersal(aka Grasshopper) when asked about his SOS refereeing of 9 matches in which NSW won only 2 responded by saying that any ref could have 2 bad matches and when further asked about his reaction to NSW detractors responded....

"It's mind over matter- I don't mind and they don't matter".