COMMENT
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Pink, blue or gold - what colour shirts the NRL referees wear this season doesn't concern me one little bit.
What will concern me is how they go about officiating games.
Tony Archer and his men have the perfect opportunity this weekend to get rugby league players and fans on side for 2015.
And that won't come down to how they look in their new uniforms.
It seems the general popularity of our match officials has steadily declined over the years.
It can be blamed on the NRL's constant rule changes and directives from above, but surely the men in pink (or yellow, or red) get sick of being booed week in, week out.
It appears the NRL hasn't done its referees any favours this year either, with the reported crack-down on "wrestling" during games.
I agree wrestling has become too prevalent but it only means the games will be made slower by an increased penalty count.
Let's hope the referees see sense and keep their whistles in their pockets a little more.
The referees over in England during the World Club Challenge last month let the games flow more than they do in the NRL and it made for some exciting viewing.
It's fans who keep a sport alive and thriving and no one goes to a football game to watch the referee.
Watching an official try to take too much control is annoying.
There have been times I've been so frustrated watching penalty after penalty that I've had to switch the television off.
Let the players play the game and only blow your whistle when it's absolutely necessary.
Rugby league is still the greatest game of all but it's not hard to see why some people are being turned off it.
The NRL has become a stop-start affair and it shouldn't be that way.
Take me back to when it was free-flowing, it was all about referees letting the play run.
Referees are an integral part of our game but the less we see (and hear) of them, the better rugby league is to watch.
I like the idea of having one dominant official and one secondary referee. It may well eradicate the inconsistency of calls at either end of the ground.
There's no such thing as an off-season for the NRL.
Even through the players are supposed to be away on holidays they still manage to dominate newspaper's headlines.
Greg Bird no doubt wants to go back to when he was in trouble for urinating on a police car.
Who knows how deep this cocaine scandal goes, and how many more past and current players will be affected?
John Sutton and Luke Burgess had too much to drink and embarrassed themselves over in America but somehow escaped any punishment from the NRL.
How a player can cop a $50,000 fine for a single tweet but two blokes get off basically scot-free for assaulting a bouncer is beyond me.
The NRL seriously needs to sort out its integrity unit and the consistency of its penalties.
The answer is not having access to players' phones and computers - that just seems ludicrous to me.
You can keep a lid on players' behaviour without completely invading their privacy.
Anyway, the NRL season is finally here so let's put the past couple of months behind us and enjoy the footy.