Time for NRL to cut losses, save some money and ditch the Bunker

After what has been described as the weekend from hell in some media reports, the NRL’s Bunker involvement during Round 25 of the home and away season was nothing short of embarrassing.

Plenty of long-term NRL fans saw it coming, with the older-schooled folk that have followed and supported the game for generations sceptical from the get-go with the introduction of an added layer of technology that adds further frustration and interpretation to the rules of the game.

In short, the more layers of officialdom and additional time allowed to make decisions, in what has become one of the most difficult games on the planet to officiate, does little more than bring extra voices and complication into the process.

The increased number of perspectives brought into decision making after the introduction of the Bunker has done absolutely nothing to make the game better, both for fans and for the players, coaches and clubs that all want to be rewarded fairly for the efforts produced on the field.

There is no doubt that a perfect system overseeing any sport does not exist, yet what the game was forced to endure during Round 25 was horrific in terms of the thirst for consistency that the NRL claims to have been one the fundamental reasons for bringing it into the competition in the first place.

The governing body assures us that “The Bunker was introduced to provide NRL review officials with world-class technology and enable them to deliver more accurate, efficient, consistent and transparent decisions.”

Like you, I’d argue that what we are seeing on a regular basis is more like farce than the rhetoric and rubbish in the official language used by the NRL.

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Perhaps the technology is world class, although we have had a few issues in that area as well, and as for the accuracy, efficiency, consistency and transparency of decisions, I’d suggest fans right across the game would laugh openly when considering the exact opposite we see playing out the majority of the time.

Now, a promise has been made that there will indeed be a major off-season review of the NRL’s football department after a weekend of head-scratching that had plenty a fan, me included, tempted to switch off.

How two Sea Eagles were sin-binned for incidents on Friday night against the Tigers and Canterbury captain Stephen Crichton escaped in-game sanction is simply an unanswerable conundrum.

Crichton will sit for a week after the subsequent one week suspension that, along with the season ending injury to Kurt Mann, has the Bulldogs under a little personnel pressure heading into this weekend’s clash with the Sea Eagles.

The fact that eight different officials were used in the Bunker across the entirety of Round 25 has many voices shouting about consistency and interpretation. Yet using a single human or duo over the four days that encapsulate a normal home and away round of the NRL competition might very well send both of them to a bed alongside Jack Nicholson in One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest.

Frankly, any suggestions to do so are ridiculous, just as asking one person to play the role of the on-field referee across eight matches might be a lovely idea in terms of consistency of decisions, but as daft as can be.

The NRL is a national competition, well sort of, and referees will always have slightly different lines in the sand when it comes to becoming frustrated and finally making the call to penalise a team. Moreover, is it not absurd to think anything different of the people occupying the chairs in the Bunker?

Hence, are we not admitting as a collective that by adding the extra layer of officialdom, the NRL is actually bringing further grey into the game, despite its insistence that plenty a decision is made correctly and the fan outrage is nothing but an over-reaction?

I would argue no and that the calls made successfully by the Bunker, the vast majority of which are relatively straight forward, should not be seen as important successes.

What is far more important is a well versed and rehearsed team of folk in the Bunker able to bounce decisions off each other with near 100 per cent consistency in terms of their individual interpretations.

At the minute, we have nothing near that and after what we saw in Round 25, there are signs of a broken system that detracts from our game rather than adding to it.