Darn it if Paddy O'Brien wasn't the Ref again. It seems like I have reviewed him too much of him recently.

I am not going to review him - I'll only mention the high tackle.

Not the sort of thing that you would expect from Tana Umaga. It was certainly a brilliant step inside by Romi Ropati. It must have been an astonishing reflex action for Tana even to get his left arm out.

Unfortunately the "clothes-line effect" was just as dramatic! Paddy was completely correct to send Tana from the field.

However Mr. O'Brien completed a double whammy by also awarding a penalty try.

I am sure that some of you think this went a bit far.

Most penalty tries are given for cynical infringing. I don't think that anyone would accuse Tana of such a thing, Brendon Laney... maybe? Robin Brooke in a second! but not Tana.

Of course cynical isn't a requirement, an infringement that prevents a certain try is. So the penalty try was fully justified.

Video Refs

One other thing I saw over the weekend was the Video referee call from hell.

I think it was in an ARL game. The referee wasn't certain of whether a try had been scored and "went upstairs", as the League commentators like to say.

Well the Video Ref had a look, and... he had another couple of looks... and he decided that he couldn't tell either!

So he sent that message back to the Match Referee. (Ah? Mate... I dunno... Back to you!!)

The Referee then did the only thing he could, and disallowed the try.

Seems quite a bit of mucking around, doesn't it. But we can expect to see it happen in the Super 12. Especially after the "I'll get back to you" Video Ref call in the Crusaders / Blues game.

Yes folks there will be times ahead when we will wonder why we ever went to Video Refs.