Noble comments on referees:

[stevethegas]

Quite what the new pedantry about offside is trying to achieve I am not sure. Certainly the greatest game of all is in danger of being stifled by excessive and disruptive penalties. The thing is, last season the offside rule was applied, players offside got penalised and the game flowed OK. Effectively the new application of rules has made an 11 metre gap instead of 10, the the game is nowhere near as entertaining.
Time for the RL to wise up and realise that this pedantic nonsense is killing the goose that lays the golden egg. We look like rugby league by committee instead of rugby league by the committed.

[turf]

I think it is going to be the latter one Morph.

Unfortunately, the games are going to be spoiled by the whistle blowers.

[jaws1]

Ganson reffed the Leeds and Bradford match on thursday he didn't blow his whistle much and the game flowed much better.On the tv it was blatently obvious that both sides were not on side both feet behind the line and did not blow up.

[mike binder]

ive got to say yes im getting bored with all this stop start shit,if the refs were to penalise everything by the rule book ,there would be a penalty at every play the ball .No 1 plays it proper and you could give offside at every tackle as not every 1 gets back.wilkins and Roby were offside yesterday more than they were on side ,but didnt get penalised.
Must admit getting bored of paying to watch a prick of a ref instead of 2 rugby teams ,commen sense needs to provale but dont think any of them have any

[Big Steve]

And after the Wigan-Saints game I'd say Noble was proven correct.

The ref ruined the game as a contest in the first 30mins.

You can't play against a half decent saints team without the ball and expect to be in the game. The ref gave saints field position and possession without them having to do any work - and with 1 person in the bin it's like a training session for saints.

If the ref blows for every offside then OK it's going to be a rubbish game but at least it's fair.
In the first half he penalised wigan for every offside, but didn't even look at Saints who were clearly offside a number of times.

Can anyone can watch the replay on TV and say hand on heart that saints were always on side?

On about 70mins he actually started to look at the Saints line and penalised them but the game was over by the first 30 - but the overall effect was that it slightly balanced the pen count up.

I'm not saying the ref is bent but the way they are applying the rules - overzealously for part of teh time and not at all for the rest is basically ruiningthe game as a contest.

As I said on another site and someone mentioned here, the Leeds - Bradford game had only a handful of technical pens and was a 100% better and fairer game. BUT you could see countless times when the players had a foot over the advantage line.

Leeds won because they were a far better side than Bradford. Saints did not deserve that winning margin yesterday.