Northern refs are the next challenge for SA teams

If Saturday’s Treviso disaster for the Vodacom Bulls had lessons in for local teams ahead of thentry into the United Rugby Championship, one of them would be that a massive work will need to be done on referees in the northern hemisphere.

As the Cheetahs and Kings can attest in their time in PRO14, there was little love lost between them and refereeing decisions, with hometown refs sometimes the norm of the competition.

And while the referee for Saturday’s final, Frank Murphy, can’t be given any of the blame for the Bulls poor performance, it didn’t help that they were on the wrong side of his whistle from the beginning.

As the Bulls saw in their only loss in the Rainbow Cup when AJ Jacobs whistled their scrum into submission, adapting to refereeing is key to any professional side hell bent on success.

The fact that Jacobs’ review afterwards showed up that they were never as much at fault as the penalty count suggests is a hard swallow after the fact.

The same goes for Murphy’s performance on Saturday, which at times would have frustrated the most neutral of fans, especially at the breakdown.

The reality is, that while Southern Hemisphere referees have tended to let things go in aid of a flowing game, their counterparts in the Northern Hemisphere are a lot stricter on aspects that South African teams would see as overly picky.

Up until now, other than the Kings and Cheetahs in PRO14, South Africans have only encountered that with test referees with the Springbok team, often with mixed results.

But the reality of it set in rather fast on Saturday as Murphy gave the Bulls no leeway and was a lot less friendly than the South Africans they have encountered in local derbies over the past eight months of local rugby.

However the signs have been there before. The Stormers were incensed in their recent loss to the Bulls at Loftus Versfeld when their final captain’s challenge was not considered by Jaco Peyper.

But Peyper was under strict instructions from the PRO14 refereeing head to impose the captain’s challenge in its strictest terms, and it underlined that while South African teams have for years been using a more liberal Southern Hemisphere approach, things have changed drastically in moving into the north.

To be clear, the Bulls had only themselves to blame for their performance, and the panic that set in on the field after they went down by more than a score.

But it is a lesson they will need to take to heart more, and while there is a mammoth amount of dissecting over foreign sides that will need to happen over the next few months, they can take a leaf out of Rassie Erasmus’ book at the World Cup and do a comprehensive study of the refs.

Because, if they thought Saturday was a wake-up call on all fronts, there are a few referees who are a lot more focused and pedantic on stuff they would take for granted, waiting for them in the next few months.

To counter that they need to be better, and making sure they are on the right side of referees is a good start.