The NRL has admitted referee Chris Sutton should not have called a forward pass in the lead-up to what could have been a match-winning try for Manly against South Sydney in round four.
The league has no timeline on determining whether to introduce ball-tracking technology aimed at eliminating similarly contentious calls from the game, but is highly unlikely to do so by the season's end.
With the scores tied in the first half of Saturday night's game at Accor Stadium, the Sea Eagles made a break up the left side of the field.
As he was being tackled, Sea Eagles centre Brad Parker managed to offload to Josh Schuster, who sent fullback Tom Trbojevic to the tryline with another pass.
But before Trbojevic could place the ball on the ground, Sutton called the play back on the grounds Parker had made a forward pass.
The decision became the subject of debate in the days that followed, not least because Manly eventually lost the game by only one point.
Responding to the fallout from the incident on Monday, NRL head of football Graham Annesley said while the ball had floated forward the match officials had made the wrong call.
Per the NRL's rulebook a ball must travel forward out of the ballcarrier's hands to be judged forward.
"The angle of the ball as it comes out of the hands, has been passed backwards," Annesley said of Parker's pass.
"The ball has clearly moved forward across the ground, but that's not the indicator of a forward pass."
The controversy comes as rugby league bosses deliberate whether to introduce ball-tracking technology aimed at removing contentious forward pass calls from the game.
Developed by UK-based sports company Sportable, the technology would require a small chip to be inserted into the ball that could determine which direction it left a player's hand.
Last June, Annesley said he had been pleased with initial in-game tests on the technology and was hopeful the NRL could make a decision about whether to adopt it by this season.
The matter remains in the hands of the Australian Rugby League Commission, though, and even if a decision is made in the short-term the technology is highly unlikely to be introduced mid-season.
AAP understands the ARLC has yet to determine the cost of adopting the technology league-wide.
The ARLC will consider two major points: Whether the technology is definitively reliable and whether it will upset the current balance between flow and stoppages in the game.
"We have to consider this trade-off all the time with technology," Annesley said.
"We've gone to some considerable length this year to try and take the bunker out of the game.
"We'll continue to provide (the ARLC) with as much information as possible. All of those things are still being explored and will continue to be explored, I just can't put a timeline on it.
"It's not the sort of thing that would normally be introduced mid-season."
Despite admitting the latest forward pass call had been "frustrating", Parker questioned whether obtrusive new technology was the way to avoid repeated instances.
"Sometimes if you tamper with the game too much, it kind of ruins it," Parker said.
"It's just one of those things. It's an on-field decision. (The referees) are like the players, they make mistakes sometimes."
