Quote ="Harrigan"It doesn't
That's what makes me laugh at fans getting annoyed about it. The same warning as always stands, it's just a way of speeding the game up without having to call the captain over for a 2 minute chat. We are only more aware of the warning being in place now because we can see the signal.'"
To be fair Harrigan, I am surprised by this post from you. You are correct, technically nothing has changed, but of course it is naive to think that the reality hasn't changed significantly by the introduction of a signal the crowd can now all see. Previously, even when watching on Sky, when the ref called the captain over it was rarely clear to understand if a ref was issuing a formal warning or not. The refs would often say things like 'you need to cut out these off-sides or I might be forced to take further action' but what did that really mean, was it a warning or not? Sometimes it was a very clear warning, but previously if the next penalty came maybe 5 or 10 minutes later, while the crowd might shout for a yellow, he was under less pressure if he felt that the side had indeed tidied up its act sufficiently since the warning because the crowd and even the opposing side, could never be 100% sure why the ref has called the captain over and issued a warning. As we saw on Sunday, Hicks was probably prompted by Sinfield (along with the large Leeds crowd doing their bit and now expecting a card as being inevitable) to send the Cas player to the bin and rather than say to Sinfield, well I think they have tidied things up, he just out the card!
If you look at Ganson on Friday night and the massive difference between HKR's penalty rate and Wakefield penalty rate, which got both sides with players in the bin, then was Wakefield's sin-binning really required? I don't think so, Wakefield were not repeatedly offending to slow down the overall momentum of the game like HKR appeared to be doing earlier when the gave away 4 penalties over just a few minutes. I suspect even Ganson would have let Wakefield carry on previously, but now their was expectation that he should bin a Wakey player irrespective, and Ganson gladly obliged.
Nothing has been technically changed... but I think so far, it clear that it has!
