Archives for April 2011

I applaud James Graham for taking the plunge and leaving his hometown club St Helens to test himself in rugby league's top club competition in Australia.

The England prop, who captained the side in last year's Four Nations, moves with a burgeoning reputation as a front-line enforcer with terrific hands, and I can't wait to see how he fares against the best the NRL has to offer.

Don't get me wrong, I have a huge amount of respect for one-club men who repay their team by staying loyal throughout their career - I wrote a blog praising Kevin Sinfield's loyalty to Leeds only a couple of months ago.

As a fan of Super League - in my view the most exhilarating sporting product that a British sport fan has on their doorstep - I of course want to see the very best players lighting up our game.

But I also believe the much-debated gap in international class between England and the southern hemisphere superpowers can only narrow if more of our top players opted for a spell down under.

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Rugby league's top story this week hardly merits a hearty pat on the back for the game, or its rulemakers. When the latest twist in the Willie Mason soap opera was leaked on Thursday lunchtime, I did my best to explain it to my colleague on the 5 Live sports desk before chuckling and admitting "I know, it's a ridiculous one this isn't it?.

Having been acquired as "arguably the biggest signing in the club's illustrious history" last September and paraded as a rugby league superstar when he arrived at Hull KR only last month, Mason now finds himself de-registered.

Why? Well Rovers were able to exploit a loophole in the laws governing overseas quotas and de-register their injured Australian half-back Michael Dobson to pave the way for Mason's initial arrival.

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I feel like I have written and spoken about nothing but refereeing and respect over the past fortnight. And each time I discussed the issue of officiating in football, I found myself wanting to say: "I don't want to always bring it back to rugby but..."

Let's face it, rugby league is a sport where players behave and officials are respected - on the whole. You rarely see a player mouthing off to an official. If you do, then he is swiftly removed from the pitch. When was the last time a bunch of rugby players surrounded a ref thinking such intimidation may reverse the decision? They accept the situation and get on with it. Some players even still call the official "Sir".

Yet is it fair to compare referees in football and rugby league?

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Referees, respect and Rooney - you'd have done well to have heard one of my sports bulletins over the past month without any of these being mentioned. As I drove to Hertfordshire to accept a Football Association invite to be a referee for the day, I found myself asking two questions: Do referees deserve their rough ride? How hard can the job actually be?

I'd be welcomed by FA bosses, given a theory test on the laws of the game, and then actually referee an academy game. So not only might I find that I don't fully understand all of football's rules, but I could also be facing the prospect of being verbally abused on the pitch by the county's top teenage footballers. Why would I agree to that? I quite like a challenge, so I decided to give it a go.

Arriving unshaven in a pathetic bid to look intimidating, I am greeted by my guide Roger Vaughan, a national referee manager and a thoroughly good bloke. This is a relief, having had visions of boot-camp tutoring by Pierluigi Collina's more intimidating older brother.

Roger and his colleagues, including 2002 World Cup final assistant Phil Sharp, outline some of the pressures officials are under. Phil tells me that he could make a dubious offside call early in a game that leads to or denies a goal and regardless of the remainder of his performance, he knows he can only be marked 59/100 by his assessors.

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Quite what users of social networking site Twitter made of "Widnes" popping up as a worldwide trending topic on Thursday is anyone's guess.

For a day at least people were talking rugby league. I was in the unusual position of leading my sports desks - both on BBC Radio 5 live and the BBC News Channel - with the Vikings' return to Super League.

Granted, most people simply wanted me to explain what the whole licence system actually meant, but there was also genuine interest in the elevation of this famous old rugby league town into the game's top echelon once more.

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