I know we won, but the Jacob Liddle "strip" penalty at the 24:21 to go mark needs to be called out as a failure of the ref's knowledge of the rules.
A penalty restart cannot legally occur until the referee has officially designated the mark. Yet, as the footage clearly shows, the ref was still mid-motion signaling the strip while Liddle was already tapping the ball.
Because the ref failed to stop and set the mark a mandatory "condition precedent" under the laws the play should have been ruled dead and the tap retaken. Instead, this procedural black hole ignored our right to a captain’s challenge and led directly to Charlie Guymer being binned for offside at an illegal restart. Ultimately it gifted the Dragons a try when they were obviously looking completely exhausted and out of ideas.
It’s one thing to miss a "bang-bang" call like a forward pass, but it’s another for a referee to either ignore the rules or worse still not know the rules.
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I thought Charlie and another one of our players were pointing at someone to challenge the call also and there was no fair time window allowed by the referee before he responded the way he did.
I think the bigger issue is that you can't have a decision that is allowed to be challenged and then allow a quick tap. Especially when 80% of the time the ref sends them back and says I didn't give you the mark.
We genuinely wanted to challenge that and based off the quick replay I saw I reckon we had a pretty good case.
What Guymer did was dumb. Its 101 you can't do that but you can't not let us use our challenge because the other team tapped the ball too quickly. There's already too much speed in the game. Ban the quick tap.
I havn't seen the replay but at the game is was WTF?