Disgruntledee's,
It was only a matter of time until Balmain were robbed blind by the Bamfords.
Robbed blind.
Didn't take long, did it?
Only Round 4.
And it was all the more galling that it came on the weekend after the Boss Cocky of The Umpires had called on the hopeless jokes in his charge to stop blowing their whistles and just let the flow of the game go.
Advantage, field position, distance from goal are all premium in rugby league.
So what did the referee's do?
They blew the bejesus out of pea in the whistle for the slightest technical infraction of the rules or some petty imagined regulation that no one had ever read in the rule book...nit-picking of the highest order is the last thing you need in football umpires.
It seemed like every few minutes the Bamfords blew up the game and stopped the play dead in it's tracks, just when things were looking good for one or another of the two teams involved.
What the referee's don't understand is that rugby league is not a girlie game; by and large these are grown men who should be well left sort it out between themselves.
They don't need any help from the authorities.
Penalties should be reserved only for clear professional fouls - the home crowd will tell you when it's not on - while fighting, biting, headbutting, tripping, spitting, scrotum re-arrangement, chicken-winging, spear tackles, blatant clothesliner tackles, stomping etc should be send off offences - as they were back in the day.
Otherwise, the referees should just stay right out of it.
In the second half found myself launching off the lounge and screaming at the television "can you just put that farkin' whistle away!"
Most tellingly, it came into play against the Tigers late in the second half when fatigue and lack of match fitness and a big set of penalties for the most trivial of infringements let the Bulldogs in for two irksome tries to level up the scores, after Balmain had the better of the game all day.
Grrrr.
A 24-24 draw at full-time.
You would have easily come to the conclusion by now...that in my opinion... uneducated, blind, ignorant, useless Bamfords are the biggest blight on the game in the modern era.
Could get really riled up, but there's little point.
The extra time field goal was nothing to write home about...it wobbled and dobbled off the boot to just clear the cross-bar by an inch or two, and the second most hated team in the league beat Balmain, again.
The scoreboard never lies.
Still, on the sunny side, it's pleasing to see the Mighty Tiges can match it with the teams currently running 3rd and 4th on the ladder and come out of both games far from disgraced.
And Coach Squeak knows it, marking down those games in the "we'll learn from our losses" side of the Coach's Ledger.
By no means any call for panic in the early part of the season.
WESTS TIGERS 24. Tries: Tedsesco (2), Lovett, Brookes. Goals: Moses (4).
CANTERBURY-BANKSTOWN BULLDOGS 25. Tries: Rona (2), Lichaa, Morris. Goals: Hodkinson (4). Field Goals: Mbye (1).
At Olympic Stadium, Homebush.
Crowd: 20, 212.
