With all due respect, that's complete one-eyed cobblers.

I've yet to see a game this season where a referee has repeatedly penalised one side for an offence and not applied the same criteria to the other. Would any of the examples you have in mind happen to involve Leeds being on the wrong end of the penalty count, by any chance?

Say what you like about the quality of refs, but making barely shrouded accusations of bias is out of order IMO.

Did you see the game yesterday????????
If so then you'll of seen the giants penalised 3/4 times for offside defending their goal line then at the other end saints were doing it ALL the time.
Now call it cobblers or whatever it happened and guess what it had nothing to do with leeds either

Persoanlly I'd like to see a balance somewhere between the two. I would accept a slightly higher risk of getting a few marginal decisions wrong if it meant not having so many long stoppages where frame-by-frame footage is scrutinised. I don't particularly want to watch a game where every decision is correct if it's at the expense of having to wait 2 or 3 minutes to award every try.

Away from the try line St Helens conceded plenty of offside penalties themselves and probably lost the penalty count overall.

I thought Silverwood had a good game apart from the Graham punch at the play the ball in the lead up St Helens first half try.

One man happy after his team got beat at the weekend should be Steve Ganson though. He now gets the final without the controversy of last year.

Not if they give it to the "best" ref on form he won't!

When has that ever formed part of Cummings criteria in appointing referees in finals?

Besides which it ought to be a straight choice between the semi final referees and I understood you to be upset with Silverwood's handling of yesterday's game.

Not upset at all i just think there were offences that should of been picked up on when they were at the other end.
I should of added the touch judges aswell TBF.

If the knock on decision was the one I think it was, a saints player had actually grounded the ball despite fairly obviously having gone into touch. Silverwood referred it to the VR, ostensibly to check whether the score should be allowed. The VR ruled out the try but confirmed that the game should be restarted with a scrum following an earlier knock on. I'm pretty sure that Silverwood knew there was no try and effectively used the VR to adjudicate on the knock on. Had there been no grounding of the ball, Silverwood wouldn't have been able to use the VR; as it was, he took advantage of a fairly unusual set of circumstances to come to the right decision.

Having said all that, I'd be 100% happy to see the VR scrapped.

Ganson's going to get it either way.

Silverwood is generally the better referee but his use of the VR yesterday was a little excessive and a direction I hope the RFL don't go down.

Given the same circumstances Ganson uses the VR just as much but he's not as obvious about it. His chats with TJ's while he get's the ruling in his earpiece are hilarious. I only wish there was an option to listen to the ref's mike instead of the commentary.