Refs should be thanking the new fall guy in sport

It used to be that the sourest of sportsfolk would predictably turn their heads toward one minority at the end of a close loss. Or an embarrassing loss. Or a loss marred by controversy. Or a completely uncontroversial loss. Any loss, really.

I talk, of course, of the endgame barrages delivered to referees that have become both commonplace and complacently common. Ricky Stuart is one of many who have turned the blaming of referees for his side’s losses into an artform. Sure, it’s not as well expressed as a Tom Wolfe exposé, or as aesthetically dazzling as a Raphael, but it still forms a kind of guttural, mildly amusing art.

For a coach in the NRL, performing in this genre is easy. He simply must express his frustration to his club officials, week after week, at those interminable referees and their attempts to foil his side’s cheating. Then he must convince them that it’s worth 10,000 of their dollars (which surely could be better used in developing grass roots or some other ideal proffered as another of the many reasons his mighty game is losing the battle to AFL, or football, or ping pong) to let Ricky slag the refs after a particularly difficult game. Then Ricky Stuart hands a cheque to the NRL, paid in full by his club’s board, and gets a ‘fairer’ rub of the green for the next couple of games, as refs are scared that ol’ man Stuart is going to run after them with his musket if they don’t penalise the stuffing out of the other team.

But I’ve noticed that there haven’t been nearly as many articles about how clueless the referees are since the darkest day in Australian sport. Ever since ASADA has left their perch high above the Aussie sporting landscape and descended to the level of the daily sporting grind, they have become the new whipping boy for clueless columnists who want to create smoke where there are barely fire hazards, let alone a fire.

Every day we are exposed to one or another personality in the rugby league community break out the tar and brush analogy. Inevitably we then see another tired joke about Australia’s tar shortage. This leads to an article in response to the previous statement about how the investigation has to be over before we can give people the results, something people still don’t seem to get. Then we get a couple of hours of lull while there’s actual football on, then some idiot asks about ASADA again and we’re back to square one. This has been going on for two months now.

I must say it’s a lot more interesting than referee-slagging. The structural form of ASADA-bagging isn’t nearly as well defined and therefore is poorly constructed in comparison to the well-developed genre of bagging match officials. But we’re certainly getting to a point where people are blindly saying the same thing over and over again the public arena, heeding conventions no one knew existed three months ago. No one listens, but no one points out the ridiculousness of it all either.

Phil Gould is flip flopping on whether he likes ASADA more than a freshly caught fish deciding whether his left or right would be the better side to expire on. One day he understands completely that the investigation will take time, and that there is substance to these allegations. The next he’s columnising about how those up in their ivory towers (no doubt just as pompous, arrogant and disrespectful as those darned referees were) are just sticking their noses into the ‘Greatest game of all’ to have their moment in the sun.

ASADA, by giving themselves the exposure they have, have hampered their cause if anything. But consider this: when that announcement was made, with Jason Clare and Kate Lundy and Andrew Demetriou and Benji Barba, and they told everyone they were hot on the heels of a bunch of people who were cheating by using performance-enhancing drugs, do you think that clubs that did have an institutionalised illegal doping program (that is if there were any) would have continued on their merry way? Or do you maybe think that the announcement on that dark, black, opaquely noir day for sport would have prompted clubs to undergo a thorough cleaning out of the draws as well as a disposing of their programs, at least while the investigation is ongoing.

If there were clubs doping, I wager they would have stopped. The cleaning out of the cupboards bit is why the investigation is taking so long. I’m sure everyone involved would have been told to zip it if they were part of a club that had been cheating.

But I will say to those who continue to rant about how unfair all this is: they wouldn’t have announced anything if there was nothing to announce. Cooperation is extremely unlikely. We have a case in point down on the Sutherland Shire, where folks still seem to think it’s ok to turn up to a legally binding meeting in trackies and thongs.

And just as you had to get used to referees making mistakes, you’re just going to have to get used to this ASADA thing.