BESIEGED referees boss Robert Finch last night insisted his job was safe - even if whistleblowers Ben Cummins and Gerard Sutton no longer have theirs.
Amid the chorus of cries for his own resignation, Finch has unceremoniously dumped Cummins and Sutton in the wake of Sunday's ANZ Stadium debacle in which Eels captain Nathan Cayless and Souths centre Beau Champion were controversially sin-binned.
Finch insisted the 63rd-minute blunder in sending Cayless from the field for a strip - instead of Eels five-eighth Daniel Mortimer - was the chief reason behind their axing. He was also critical of Sutton taking so long to rule that Champion's high tackle on Jarryd Hayne three minutes later deserved the sin bin.
"They got the wrong player - that's unacceptable," Finch said. "When we've got two sets of eyes on it, we need to get that right. Especially when you bin the captain as well. They're a team."
"Under fire from who?" Finch bristled when asked about his future. "My concerns are whether I'm under fire from my boss. That's when I get concerned. At this point in time he's not saying anything. I'm just here doing what I do."
Eels chief executive Paul Osborne applauded the decision, but hoped it wasn't merely papering over the cracks of the referees system.
"I hope [sacking Cummins and Sutton] is not a reaction to alleviate the pressure on the referees at the moment," he said.
"I still think there's some fundamental problems."
Yet Finch found an unlikely ally in Rabbitohs chief executive Shane Richardson last night, who said: "There is no better man in the game to do that job than Robert Finch. I haven't always agreed with him but we would be poorer if we did not have him."
Finch said that even though Cummins had sin-binned Cayless, Sutton was also responsible because "he's the other set of eyes" on the field.
He was also unhappy that the pair had taken so long to march Champion. "The whole thing, where there was a lot of waiting and delaying, it didn't look good," he said. "It didn't look like they were in control of what was going on.
"At no time did they lose control of the game. But the control of what they were doing had clearly been lost. We'd put a bloke in the bin who was the wrong bloke."