Now that's just a bridge too far. The first thing to bring up is always rule 6.A.4:
- a.) The referee is the sole judge of fact and of Law during a match.
I think we, as fans, like to get caught up in the idea that refs have a bias that will decide the game one way or another, but when we sit down and think about it, they're not biased. A Saffa team might get a home ground advantage from a Saffa ref because that ref is used to the SARU game, but not because they're biased against the visiting team. And even when a ref calls the same penalty differently, they'll often explain why to the captain because they know how bad it might look; at the Brumbies-Crusaders game last year, Peyper gave Mogg a yellow card for deliberate knock down and later only penalised a Crusader for the same offence. I was mad when we were at the game live, but when I watched the replay, Peyper explained that "the other penalty was a yellow because it might have been a try, this one was on half way.".
I think that is part of why I got mad as a fan in the ground, and Moore accepted the call and moved on; he got to hear an explanation, I didn't. This is also why the reaction of fans is both more tolerable and less influential. Hell, even coaches have a hard time with these calls; Stiles basically shouted "f**king bulls**t" when the Blues got their penalty to tie the game, but he didn't go down to the press and say "We were robbed by the referee.", did he? So to see this coming from the team, a team I've liked watching this year, pisses me off.
That aside, I think I can speak for all of us when I say that the refs have been between okay and fantastic this season, usually just plain good. It's been a real pleasure, actually. Morris has been the real stand out as a fantastic referee, especially in the first Owls-Wests game and the cracker between Vikings and Whites. I saw Henshaw in the first week at Royals-Whites for the Seconds, and for Owls-Whites on the weekend, and he was good too.
I've only seen Nelson, the ref in the Royals-Easts game, at the first Eagles-Easts game and for either the Colts or Seconds at the Vikings-Whites game, and he's been good (I'm not going to claim he's great, but he's good). So not only do I think attacking him is intolerable even if he was bad, but all my experience says that he isn't, and people I've talked to who were at the game (admittedly, Royals fans too) say that he was encouraging an attacking game, and they didn't fault him.
I think it's disgraceful from Easts, and retracting it isn't good enough, active apology is needed.
