NRL officials will travel to Townsville after a number of refereeing calls cruelled North Queensland

NRL powerbrokers will face the music this week, agreeing to travel to Townsville for a crisis meeting with the North Queensland Cowboys.

NRL powerbrokers will face the music this week, agreeing to travel to Townsville for a crisis meeting with the North Queensland Cowboys.

The Townsville tour was booked as Cowboys chief executive Peter Jourdain declared a centralised video referee bunker should be built as soon as possible.

Jourdain told The Courier-Mail a war room was key to eradicating the referee howlers that have repeatedly cruelled North Queensland.

NRL head of football Todd Greenberg, who will lead the NRL’s delegation to Townsville, also believes a bunker similar to the NHL’s Toronto war room would work in the NRL.

News_Image_File: Dejected Cowboys players after Manly score a try.

Greenberg will be joined for peace talks in Townsville by NRL operations manager Nathan McGuirk who travelled to Toronto late last year to inspect the facility.

The bunker would likely be built in the NRL’s Sydney headquarters and feature four senior referees monitoring all games on a 30-foot wall of high definition televisions.

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They video referees are in constant contact with on-field officials and review every try instantly.

The system has been a success in the NHL and is about to be adopted by the NFL.

The bunker would mean all reviewed decisions across the season were in the hands of only four men.

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“It makes the best sense,” Jourdain said of the proposed bunker.

“The bunker is something I know they are seriously looking at. The technology is there now.

“The officials watch all games that are on, everything is referred back to them and they make the final decision.

“You should at least get consistency then, as the same people are making the decisions.”

Fans, players and club officials have little faith in NRL video referees following a series of blunders this season, culminating in Kieran Foran’s match-winning try against North Queensland.

Jourdain said he was not expecting the senior NRL officials to publicly apologise when they arrived in Townsville but was expecting clarity on how they will ensure such a shocking call does not happen again.

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“Todd and Nathan will be coming up later this week but we are not necessarily looking for an apology,” Jourdain said.

“We just want them to sit down with our football department, talk it all through and make sure it doesn’t happen again. They can maybe also say something to our members and fans at a press conference.”

Meanwhile, Broncos fullback Ben Barba yesterday said the NRL should copy the NFL and have on-field referees review their own decisions.

Barba said referees should be able to access video replays on the sidelines like their NFL cousins and see their own error.

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The current NRL system sees referees make an initial on-field call of try or no try before sending it upstairs for a completely different interpretation to be used.

“There have been tries taken away that are dead set tries,” Barba said.

“I would like the refs to make more of a decision. In that if they send it up and see something on the replay and think something should change then they change it instead of leaving it up to the video referee.”