I was going from your description.robjoenz posted:Do you recall the incident?Mike posted:
Thats not common sense - that an example of an infuriating descision. In that situation when clearly its a 50-50 call why the hell do you sin bin anyone! It beggars belief. Common sense would be to penalise if you have to and warn both players about what they were doing (ideally you don't have to and you can just warn the players on the run). Picking one side to penalise so severely in the 50-50 situation you described is totally wrong. You reward the Leeds player for cheating and punished the Wigan team severely for a very minor offence. I would have said the same were it the Leeds player that got sin -binned as well.
You stated that Thackeray was trying to milk the penalty holding onto Fieldens arm. Fielden wasn't "trying hard enough" to remove it whatever that means. That sounds pretty 50-50 to me, yet the referees descision results in a massive advantage to one side or the other. That simply does not reflect the incident - both sides in the wrong = one side one man down for 10 minutes. Also, in that situation, if the player with the trapped arm does try to remove it and whilst doing that the player in posession releases the ball there is a fair chance the ref will penalise him for ball stealing!Wigan (I seem to remember Fielden specifically) had been warned for slowing things down after a couple of penalties in quick succession. Then Fielden deliberately stays atop Thackray appealing to the referee that he cannot remove his arm when it is clear he is not even trying (when your arms are that muscly it's easy to see when they tense and when they are relaxed).
Having penalised twice already, the time for warning on the run will have passed. It wasn't a 50-50 decision, Fielden was trying his luck.
My position is that they should legalise it entirely. Its totally stupid to have a rule where almost every call is entirely based on interpration and opinion and could go either way - and have the ruling call for a punishment as severe as a penalty.Where do you stand on ball stealing (applying the existing rules)... a player carries the ball loosely and the tackler has his hands on the ball to prevent the offload. The balls comes free... it's a 50-50 in many peoples eyes... you can't just play-on and have a chat on the run.
If we do want to keep multi man ball stealing out of the game (although I'm not sure the argument that it promotes offloading has been proven) why not reduce the stealing offense to result in a scrum. The attack gets another 6 tackles, but does not gain potentailly crucial field advantage. That would rectify the inequality of the referees call and go some way to reducing the effect of the referees interpretation, which is often just guesswork, on the outcome of the match. You could make a video of hundreds of incorrect ball stealing descisions that you can only see from one camera angle of another - the referee just doesn't have a chance of getting them all right and it isn't their fault, its just impossible to be correct. The only fair thing is to make the advantage/disadvantage of an incorrect or correct call much more even. This iead probably doesn't work within the setup of the rules - its foul play I suppose rather than an accidental offense so must be punished with a penalty, but perhaps ball stealing could be interpreted as a "knock on by the defence", in the same way that feeding the scrum is interpretted as striaght every time?
Its these sorts of issues that the referees should be addressing in the offseason - not obstruction.
