It certainly comes to mind when digesting the weekly controversy surrounding referees and the multi-million dollar water torture, the NRL bunker.

This week it was Dragons coach Paul McGregor in the spotlight for his criticism of referees with the NRL slapping a $10,000 fine on him for labeling the bunker calls in his side's loss to Newcastle "incompetent and embarrassing."

In sanctioning McGregor on Tuesday, NRL head of football Brian Canavan said: “In simple terms, the rule is that coaches, players and officials should not discuss referees and their performances in the public domain.”

That may be the case Brian, but we in the media are not restricted in what we ask and it’s our duty to ask questions surrounding the most pressing issue to arise in a match. All too often these days, it’s calls from the bunker. 

Referees boss Tony Archer has backed the decisions but you can bet your life savings (in Kick-off’s case$11.04) that, had the calls gone the other way, he’d have found a way to justify them as well. 

Truth is, calls in rugby league overwhelmingly come down to opinion. Back in the day, it was the judgement call of one referee, working with one set of eyes and therefore susceptible to one degree of human error.

Kick-off was sitting on our regular stool at Dicey Rileys this week pondering that fact, when a fellow patron brought up Mark McGaw’s match-winning try in game one of the 1987 Origin series.

It’s a moment just as famous for the panning shot of Maroons coach Wayne Bennett crying out “Oh Nooo” as McGaw, in the dying moments, planted a loose ball inches from the dead-ball line in a mad in-goal scramble.

Referee Mick Stone briefly looked left, looked right, and pointed to the spot. The Blues won 20-16. Game over, discussion over. No “separation” no “evidence” sufficient or otherwise. In the words of Journey “life was so much simpler then.”

“In those days that’s what you were trained to do, you were trained to make decisions,” Stone told Kick-off from his home in Forster this week.

“All you had to do in those days was make a call. It wasn’t like I could defer to someone to make it. You made a hundred of them a match and that was just another call.

It helped that he got the call 100 per cent right and you certainly can’t question his cajones as a ref (he famously sent The King Wally Lewis to the sin-bin at Lang Park, sparking a thunderstorm of XXXX cans falling from the sky) but he’s the first to admit he didn’t get them all right. 

“That was the thing in the day, you obviously wouldn’t get them all right, that was part of the deal. The players used to accept that. 

“You’d get majority of them right and get some of them wrong but they just shrugged and said ‘alright away we go’.”

Human error will always be a factor but under the current system, the capacity from human error multiplies exponentially with each set of eyes. It multiplies again with each camera angle.

Add the eyes of the millions watching and that grey area is starting to look like the milky way and that’s about how far we are away from refereeing perfection. As Stone told us, “you can have as many steps as you like, but at the end of the line is a human being with their finger on a button.”

Every week, we watch multiple replays we’d rather not see. There’s so many different ones we can’t figure out how we feel about it from the couch.

In the technological age, we simply can’t go back. Camera angles are provided by television networks with the aim of creating the total viewer experience.

You can't give those charged with making crucial decisions less information with which to make them than the public who will scrutinise them.

But boy, do we long for a time where we saw as much, or as little, as the on-field referee. Like the Winfield Cup, Simply the Best, and Cans of KB, those days are gone, but surely we can pine for them a little.

Ignorance really is bliss.