Much of rugby and its devotees have lamented referees grabbing centre stage in recent games, but the truth is match officials are seldom away from the spotlight.
With increased powers bestowed on them and the game's laws continually changing so that more actions, even the most innocuous, becoming punishable, referees can’t help but be thrust to the fore.
Sure, there are some poor match officials, but the game’s laws are now more than ever designed for policing, not facilitating.
While the game’s decision-makers want a sport that is dynamic and flows, match officials are bound by the inescapable reality that player’s safety comes first. In a high energy collision sport like rugby contact, undesirable or benign, can carry the same heavy sanction.
Rugby’s decision-makers can’t be blind to the existential crisis the sport is facing.
Last weekend’s Test between SA and Argentina delivered perhaps a perfect storm of an overzealous and frankly out-of-his-depth match official — Australia’s Damon Murphy — abandoning common sense for the full embrace of the law book.
Argentina had the book thrown at them to the tune of 22 penalties and four yellow cards. No wonder their irascible coach Michael Cheika kept shouting from the stands.
That the large crowd had to endure a match punctuated by the shrill of the referee’s whistle is frankly a blight on the sport.
The United Rugby Championship (URC) has also served up a steady stream of match official misadventure. Thankfully they are doing something about it with their referees boss Tappe Henning leading the charge.
The most significant intervention the URC has in the pipeline, is the appointment of Nigel Owens (Wales), George Clancy (Ireland), Stuart Berry (SA) and Neil Paterson (Scotland) as independent selectors. The four retired international referees were also charged with bringing a fresh performance review process as they select a URC elite match official panel.
The URC will now have a panel of 20 referees with three added for development purposes. The URC said in a statement “referees will continue to be appointed to the TMO role to upskill them and create greater consistency in the decision-making processes”.
The same referees and TMOs will be paired regularly “to enhance teamwork and consistency in TMO process and decisions. Pairings may also swap roles, with one official refereeing on a Friday night and then doing TMO on Saturday”.
The URC now also has set-piece coach in Stevie Scott, who has been tasked with improving match officials’ scrum, line-out and maul knowledge. He has to measure and increase accuracy of referee set-piece work and decision-making.
The statement added: “The URC match official game analyst is now full-time and will provide game footage to disciplinary processes, support match officials in game review and match preparation and collate match data relevant to match official performance and game tendencies developing in the URC competition.”
These are all positive initiatives as they try to equip their officials better in the discharge of their duties. The URC don’t make the laws and it is that element of the sport that will continue to frustrate rugby’s rank and file. It will almost surely scare off any new fans.
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