TALKING POINT: running the rule over refs

Senior rugby writer Gavin Rich takes on a subject that's been causing him some angst of late....

The Rich dictionary definition:

Frustration: noun - what South African franchise coaches feel when their teams are playing in Vodacom United Rugby Championship matches overseas.

That feeling of frustration is caused by a trend of poor refereeing calls that go against their teams and sometimes, like happened to the Stormers this past weekend, may have cost them a result. It’s been happening since the first year of the URC, for a while it appeared to be getting better, but the malaise - I feel - is back, and in a big way.

Stormers coach John Dobson, who of course is prohibited from making negative comments about match officials, including referees, wasn’t the only local coach who was aggrieved last weekend. The Bulls won comfortably enough against the Ospreys, and produced the South African performance of the weekend, but they would have won by much more if it were not for the weak refereeing performance that allowed the Ospreys to make a better fist of the second half.

Bulls director of rugby Jake White has quite correctly asked for the red card shown to David Kriel to be overturned. The referee in that game appeared to be reacting to the crowd - he didn’t look like he was going to refer the incidents in question to the TMO until he heard the boos and groans of the crowds.

REFS RESPOND TO CROWD EMOTION

There is a lot of crowd intimidation in northern hemisphere games, where the atmosphere is accentuated by crowds being accommodated in much smaller stadiums. The 6 000 that turned up at Loftus for the game against Ulster would not have been nearly as intimidating to the ref as the same number in a 6 000 seater stadium.

Besides, the tendency of South African stadium DJs to be out of kilter with the flow of the game, something highlighted by colleague Brenden Nel a few months ago, mitigates against referees being subjected to the same kind of pressure in games played here.

When a controversial incident happens in a local game, the crowd will probably be singing along to “Sweet Caroline” or “Don’t worry, be happy”. Or, as was the case in the test match in Mbombela when a potential carding incident was being debated by the referee and TMO, they might be asked to take out their phones and turn on the lights and wave them in the air.

Maybe the spectator who enjoys doing that might not care too much how many players are left on the field or whether the referees have got it right or wrong, but there are many who do and will have shared the frustration of the coaches when watching last week’s game on television.

It is true that there used to be complaints about the refereeing in the Super Rugby era too. But the referees did seem to be so much better than the ones currently operating in the URC. They had standing, guys like the New Zealander Paddy O’Brien, South Africa’s Andre Watson and other refs from those two countries, plus Australia.

The late Ian McIntosh might not have appreciated the Aussie Peter Marshall, but he was considered one of the best in the business at one stage.

CRITICISM IS UNWELCOME BUT IT IS NECESSARY

When you look at the URC you don’t see that kind of gravitas and standing in the game, and it might be partly because of what I am doing now. Who would want to be a professional ref when you just get criticised all the time?

One of the reasons I have often been softer on refs than others have is because they have such an unenviable job. Just like rugby writers, they are never going to have everyone agreeing with them and will never make everyone happy.

Forget the mainstream writers and television pundits who criticise them - the real modern scourge is social media. What is said on that forum is not reined back by any kind of observance of media ethics, and that a good referee like Wayne Barnes was subjected to death threats late in his career was disgraceful.

But while acknowledging that criticism may have an impact on the appetite for refereeing, and contributes to the apparent dearth of good referees in a competition like the URC, it would also be a dereliction of duty on the part of rugby’s stakeholders to ignore the problem. It undermines the sport.

As we are talking about a professional sport, there is also a lot at stake. The Stormers were arguably done in in two games on their overseas tour.

I didn’t watch their game against the Ospreys live because I was in Mbombela for the last Rugby Championship game, but watching the replay it was easy to see why the Stormers were aggrieved by the scrum calls that either went against them or should have gone their way but didn’t.

WRONG CALLS COST TEAMS GAMES

The Stormers management took it up afterwards with the URC refereeing officials and, according to forwards coach Rito Hlungwani, they were in agreement - the Stormers were done in by at least four calls. That’s a lot and pretty significant when it comes to the result in what was a very close game until the Ospreys were awarded a late penalty try.

Talking of penalty tries, there were at least two that should have been awarded to the Stormers against Edinburgh, one at maul time and the other in the scrums.

Referee Ben Whitehouse might not have warned the Edinburgh scrummagers, which was why the scrum penalty try was not awarded. But they should have been warned, over and over.

Just like the try that he initially awarded to Grant Gilchrist earlier in the game should never have been awarded either. The TMO eventually overturned it, the ball was clearly grounded short of the line. Whitehouse was unsighted at the time, you can pick that up on the replay, but then why did he award that try?

The later, much-written-about, hands in the ruck incident was as blatant, and if Dobson wanted to do a Rassie Erasmus, and bring out a video, it could run to the same length as the one Rassie produced after the first test of the 2021 British and Irish Lions series.

Some of it of course is down to interpretation, and sometimes just the referees subjective interpretation of how the game should be played. In the Bulls game, the ref kept barking at the Bulls scrumhalf to “use it” when it was pretty clear the Bulls wanted to use the power of their scrum. Which as the laws are at the moment, is their right to do.

STRONG MANAGEMENT IS KEY

The URC refereeing chief Tappe Henning has doubtless heard from White on that issue, and he will certainly hear from Dobson too, if he hasn’t already after his team conceded a record number of penalties for a URC game involving them, and with a large proportion of those highly questionable.

When Henning, a South African, was appointed it was welcomed locally both by coaches and referees, but there does appear to be a feeling that while there is a lot of listening to complaints, there isn’t enough action.

Strong refereeing can be created by strong management. Andre Watson wasn’t always the most popular figure when he was running the referees in South Africa, but he was a strong personality and that might have been why this country had so many world class referees during his time.

What won’t serve rugby is for the URC to resent the criticism rather than focus on the real issue at hand. There is surely no denying that the standard of URC refereeing needs to be raised, and significantly so, and playing the ostrich by burying heads in the sand won’t help.