THE statement released by the NRL on the Sharks-Cowboys seven-tackle try debacle on Saturday night was nothing short of a pathetic charade.

How can NRL director of football Todd Greenberg make such a see-through, false promise to the most important stakeholders in the game, the fans, and expect them to buy it?

Refereeing mistakes have now cost the Cowboys their season for two years in succession but because Greenberg releases a statement assuring us "this won't happen again in any game" we're supposed to believe it won't happen again.

Please.

What, are we living in North Korea?

Try selling that line to Cowboys coach Neil Henry.

EMBARRASSED SMITH APOLOGISES

All season we've watched the NRL happily sting coaches with $10,000 fines for daring to question the standard of refereeing.

The Parramatta Eels were forced to open their cheque book when Ricky Stuart served up both barrels back in April, then the Manly Sea Eagles were pinged when Geoff Toovey called for an investigation.

On the farcical scenes fans were forced to endure on Saturday, it looks like Toovey was bang on the money.

As if the seven-tackle charade wasn't bad enough, then there was more embarrassment in the closing seconds of the game when the video referees were checking whether Cowboys centre Kane Linnett had scored the match-winner.

When time was blown back on, the clock for the match failed to correctly continue counting down, leading Cronulla captain Paul Gallen to rightfully blow-up about why there was still 41 seconds remaining.

Embarrassingly, the clock then went from showing 41 seconds to 10 minutes remaining to 18 minutes before it was eventually removed from the scoreboard entirely.

The final insult was the players being forced to play out an unknown amount of time waiting for the final siren to sound.

Sure, everyone makes mistakes and we can't always just bash-up on the referees the minute something goes wrong.

But as dodgy decisions go, these registered a nine on the richter scale.

NRL statement issued on Saturday:

NRL Head of Football, Todd Greenberg, had the incident reviewed during the course of the first half and said there would be an inquiry into how the error occurred.

“We do not want to see mistakes like this made in any match, especially a finals game, and we will be meeting with Daniel Anderson and the match officials to examine just how this happened,” Greenberg said in a statement.

“What is most concerning is that there are checks and balances across the entire squad to safeguard against the referees making such a mistake.

“We don’t want this happening again.

“We can’t take points away or change a result of a match due to such a decision but we do have to be able to reassure players and fans that this won't happen again in any game.”