Quote ="paulwalker71"At the risk of stating the obvious, the problem that the RFL have - quite likely of their own , and it's cascading down to our level with some of the referees we now end up with.'"
This is a massive point. I deal with referees on a weekly basis for all our home games. I am seeing referees who have not been great at our level in the conference getting fast tracked into the championship and it's worrying. Liam Moore being a prime example, a couple of years ago he put a complaint in that one of our players give him some verbals after the final whistle, and this player had a beard and this player was definitely Dave Halley. So Dave gets dragged to a meeting witht he head of referees at the club. All the while every man and his dog knows Dave cant grow a single hair on his chin! Yet he ends up reffing big games in the championship.
The point im making is these guys are nowhere near ready. The week before last we had Geoffrey Poumes who is French and I have seen in pictures full time training with the super league referees. He did not even know what the score of the game was. Everyone was coming to me and Saddleworths secretary for updated scores. Nice guy but if he is to be one of our full time refs god help us all