You won’t believe this, but after watching his Manly Sea Eagles get beaten by the South Sydney Rabbitohs 22-10 in Gosford on Friday night, Geoff Toovey blew up about the referee’s!
“We need to have an investigation into this!” Toovey whinged to gathered journalists who were gleefully waiting to poke the angry bear with a stick. Toovey pointed out the 10-5 penalty count that went against his team and how his team managed to be leading at half time despite being on the wrong end of a 6-2 first half penalty count.
Toovey was furious about a try that was not given to Steve Matai, who was ruled to have been held up by the on field referee, a decision that was backed up by the video referee after there was no conclusive evidence the ball was grounded.
Toovey rightfully attacked Jeff Lima’s leg twist on Anthony Watmough. Lima was penalised for the incident that may have injured Watmough one again.
Toovey also asked “Are we back to soccer now?” in reference to a his on Greg Inglis that saw him stay down after being his in the jaw, given the referees time to review the incident and award a penalty against Manly.
Overall, Toovey was pissed off!
The problem is that the Sea Eagles didn’t play all that well after the first 20 minutes of the match. They made a lot of simple errors that allowed South Sydney to work their way back into the contest.
Overall Manly looked like a team that has spend the last few weeks smashing some average teams. They come out breathing fire, lost a lot of steam, and it cost them the game as South Sydney lifted and put on a quality performance.
I can’t stand it when coaches lose games and decide to attack the referees. Over the course of a game, and especially over the course of a season, teams get good decisions and bad decisions out of referees. It all evens up over the long run.
One of the issues with referees right now is that fans, players and coaches want EVERYTHING to go their way.
We don’t want to see referee’s making guesses when they blow the whistle. We want them to only call what they see with their own eyes. That is why we brought in a second referee. We wanted more eyes on the field. We wanted more people watching play so that referee’s didn’t need to make educated guesses about what was happening when a ball came lose or a play the ball looked a bit dodgy.
With that in mind….we can not then attack referee’s when they don’t give tried because they didn’t see the ball being grounded. We can not attack video referee’s when they review footage and can not find a single frame where the ball is grounded.
We don’t want referee’s to make guesses. We only want them to call what they see. They might miss things here or there, but that’s is what referee’s are doing. They are simply calling what they see.
When you throw your own bias on top of things that go against your team, then you throw in your outrage about shoulder charge penalties or players laying down and forcing the referee’s hand to review a decisions, and THEN you have the commentators whinging just to whinge….the poor old referee’s have NO CHANCE!
Geoff Toovey coaches the Manly Sea Eagles, a team that does pretty well for itself. Sometimes things go their way, other times they don’t. It would be nice if every so often when his team lost a match if Geoff Toovey could look at why his team might have lost the match rather then simply blaming referee’s like some spoiled brat who is pissed off because things didn’t go his way!
Watching Geoff Toovey throw tantrums every time he loses…..it’s embarrassing.
I’ve already spoke about Toovey and his rants before on the forum LOL
I agree with him about the Lima incident…it looked intentional, especially since Watmough has just come back from a knee injury.
The Matai try could be given…but the ref ruled no try and the video didn’t actually show the ball touch over the line. You can’t have a ‘it looked like it was over’ try…it needs to be shown, surely? Then again where does the benefit of the doubt come into it? LOL
The Inglis incident…it defo isn’t worth a ban. When his head went back it was his shoulder that was grabbed, nowhere near his head…BUT a second before the side of his face was hit…I’m not one to say that shouldn’t hurt having never played the game LOL but it looked minimal touch
I do think that coaches should be allowed to put their feelings across in press conferences otherwise why attend?…but there is a right way to go about it and at times Toovey does cross that line.
Oh and just to disagree with you…I thought Manly were the better team for 60 minutes 😉