Rugby League: High-profile referee shows willingness to get offside

By PETER JESSUP

The best ref in league lets his hair down in his book launched yesterday, and the NRL, players and fans are well advised to listen, given that he enjoys a position in the game that no one else has.

In Harrigan, Bill Harrigan tells of personal and match drama, names the best sledgers, details the payments that officials get, and marks himself down for bad performance.



He supports the concept of the video referee, which came in with Super League, but opposes the wiring of a referee's comments to television and the new "sports ears" for the crowd, believing comments should not be broadcast.

He doesn't like the referee interchange as tried by the NRL and has his own idea - one ref for the defending team and another for the attackers.

Harrigan, 43, was drafted into the refereeing role when at high school and can't be far off retirement. He reckons that when the three fulltime refs retire (himself, Steve Clark and Tim Mander, whose nickname he reveals as "Pinhead") the NRL won't replace them, preferring part-timers for cost reasons.

Harrigan, on A$80,000 ($92,000), signed to Super League for A$60,000, plus a company car, mobile phone and bonuses for representative games, an amount he regards as seriously remiss given what the players were offered.

Super League allowed players to choose any jersey number and it was then that he started calling players by their names - a habit he continues, despite much criticism - because he couldn't remember all the numbers when they didn't apply to specific positions.

Born in Sydney's west, Harrigan played grade football until his career in the police took over.

He was in the Tactical Response Group charged with conducting raids for serious criminals and tells how he nearly lost his life on a training exercise when a colleague's shotgun went off accidentally and blew away the door jamb next to his shoulder.

He was part of a riot squad attacked with bricks and Molotov cocktails during the Bathurst motorcycle races in 1985, and later joined the Witness Security Unit.

Harrigan has been married three times and has four sons - toddler Jed with wife Lesley, Will and Andrew from his second marriage, and Matthew, oldest at 23, the product of a shotgun wedding.

In his playing days he was a hooker, and relays details of a match for the New South Wales police against their New Zealand counterparts, including Warriors PR man Don Mann, who was sin-binned for a high tackle.

There are lots of New Zealand connections, right up to the pre-season Warriors-Panthers match in Invercargill in January. Harrigan whistled "time on" when the local brass band was still playing. It about-faced and marched off just as play entered that corner of the field.

The ref was still unaware it was there.

Harrigan refereed his first premiership game, Wests v Cronulla, at Lidcombe Oval in 1986. He sin-binned Wests hooker Alan Farrah, for which he was spat at after fulltime.

He controlled the first of his 10 grand finals in 1989, the Canberra win in overtime. His debut test was the Kiwis-Great Britain match at Ericsson Stadium in 1990, when Martin Offiah scored from a forward pass. In the next game of the series the British wing beat everyone to the try-line and then dropped the ball while performing to the crowd.

Controversy follows Harrigan and the book will generate a bit more.

Harrigan's top team: Gary Jack, Eric Groethe, Mick Cronin, Mal Meninga, John Ferguson, Wally Lewis, Andrew Johns, Steve Roach, Steve Walters, Paul Harragon, Gorden Tallis, Paul Sironen, Ray Price.