What you do not know though Fraggle is how many times he has warned either side before penalising. If he warns one side 5 times, then penalises them, then the other side commit the same offence 4 times he is being totally consistent if he does not penalise them, even if it appears the contrary.Fraggle posted:
To be honest, KK has always been one of the worst referees. Inconsistency has always seemed to be his middle name, he'll often penalise one team for something whilst letting the same thing go for the other.
If you look where Kirkpatrick was positioned when he spotted that forward pass it explains why. He was stood in the middle of the field, the ball was played to the wing and instead of tracking back to keep out of the way he remained near the play slightly infield giving him a better view of the forward pass. It's difficult to see a forward pass when you're not inline with the play and very often the referee is stood 6-10 m or so ahead of it. The touch judge cannot signal to the referee that there has been a forward pass unless the referee makes eye contact with him, he'll generally only do this if one team is shouting about it or it's totally blatent (to him, not to the spectator in the stand).Forward passes were a good example on Friday, he let a lot go before finally penalising one that wasn't really any worse than a half dozen that had gone before but un-noticed. These weren't "line balls" or "momentum rule" things, they were passes that were a good few degrees forward but he wasn't interested.
When the referee gets criticism from both sets of players it usually means he's had a good game and penalised both sets of players for offences.Interestingly, the Cas fans are complaining about the number of penalties KK did give us on Friday, and yet we're unhappy thinking that we should have had even more...