Quote BarnetFC="BarnetFC"Personally I thought Kirkpatrick was dreadful in his early days but grew to be a fine referee. Smith I always thought was pretty decent, likewise Klein although his form dropped towards the end.
Whatever you thought of them at the time to go from rotating...
Kirkpatrick, Ganson, Silverwood, R Smith, Klein, I Smith, Connolly
to rotating...
Ganson, Silverwood, Thaler, Alibert, Hicks, Roby, Child
is a colossal decline in quality.'"
As I said on the Hick's Injury thread, you're not going to improve the quality by much without improving the numbers, if there's no one snapping at the heels of the incumbents, then there's no incentive for them to improve.
Without knowing all the ins & outs of the elite referee's remuneration package, I would imagine that Cummings is under pressure to keep costs down, that's why we now see elite referees running touchlines, working on th priciple of "they're being paid, so we might as well use them".
Whoever the next SL sponsor may be, rather than the money simply be doled out to clubs to fund another foreign import, I'd like to see that money spent in the grassroots of the game and that includes referees. Hull officials always seemed to get flak whenever they travelled, I often heard "We told BARLA/The RFL not to send us refs from Hull because you cost too much in travelling expenses". When I had a job that included all private mileage on my expenses, I never charged travelling expenses to amateur clubs anyway, so would quite often spend 8 hours travelling + game time for amateur match-fee, which wasn't much to start with. During the miners' strike I don't know of any Hull refs who charged amateur clubs in mining communities anything at all. We certainly weren't in it for the money.
Most refs are ex-players: I started after a fracture of C6 stopped me playing again. Although I used to play in Hull Refs' friendlies until Harvey Standeven took a look at my X-rays and told me to stop immediately or risk ending up like Mich Shoebottom (Stan's words, not mine). The reason you don't see many ex-pros taking up the whistle is simple. Even though there has been a fast-track system for many years now, they know how hard the job is and apart from Jamie Bloem, I can't think of another ex-pro player who has come anywhere close to elite refereeing.
Apart from local refs' societies, there's very little initiative in attracting and recruiting new referees and that's another charge that can be laid squarely at Stuart Cummings' feet. I've also always complained about the lack of transparancy in the promotion of referees and how it more often had to do with who you knew rather than what you did on the field. I knew of pro-club 'A' team officials who would keep a referees marks low on purpose because "if we mark you up, you'll get promoted and then we'll lose you".
Believe me, I'm as frustrated as anyone at the standard of refereeing and apart from the elite going full-time, can see no evidence of anything that's really changed since Stuart Cummings took over. When Lindop was in charge, you were expected to referee like he used to. Now say what you like about Fred but he was super-fit, he did however want to see every ref standing over every tackle and then getting back to the 10m for the PtB. Most times it was simply unnecessary and quite often you'd miss things because you were too close to the action that a wider field of vision would enable you to spot. When McCallum took charge, everything changed, you still had to be fit but he wanted to see a more relaxed style of refereeing. I'll be buggered if I know what Cummins is looking for.
Consistency is an often talked-about problem and it is an issue but if the refs started clamping down on everything, games would last 20 minutes longer and end with fewer players on the field. As I've said, I've yet to see any tangible evidence that that standards of refereeing have declined over the years. We've seen an increase in discussion but that's mainly down to technology and websites like this. In the past we'd be lucky if the BBC had more than two cameras at a game and we didn't have the "advantage" of multi-angle, slo-mo replays of any contentious incidents, so any moaning consisted of chanting on the terraces or a week-old letter to Rugby Leaguer.
Stop harking back to a mythical era of "great refereeing", it never, ever happened
