Of all the major sports that I follow closely, Rugby arguably generates the most intense debate and scrutiny over the performance of referees, particularly in big International matches.
Former South African International referee Jonathon Kaplan has his own column in the Telegraph devoted purely to scrutinising referees’ decisions, and the recently retired Nigel Owens now opines on major officiating talking points in the widely read Mail Online Sport amongst other places.
Whereas scrutiny of referees in Football often focuses on one or two major talking points in a game, in Rugby a referee’s interpretation of a single area such as the Scrum can lead to a sizeable penalty count in one side’s favour, massively shifting the likelihood of one side winning, as England fans know all to well from the 2019 World Cup final.
Whereas in Football a referee may give one decision such as a penalty which leads to the only goal in the game and angers fans, being on the wrong end of officiating in Rugby is a slower death. Penalty after penalty accumulate and the opposition’s lead increases in increments of 3 and fans are left after the final whistle to debate whether it was poor discipline or bad refereeing that led to their teams’ demise.
Unlike in football where managers frequently berate referees after the game, often just taking the subsequent FA fine on the chin to vent their frustration or to protect their players, the Rugby World true to it’s gentlemanly nature tends to be more cautious in its language when discussing officials.
Owen Farrell kept his cool and deflected questions by Sonja McLaughlan on Gauzere’s decision to allow two dubious Welsh half tries. Eddie Jones towed a similar line, joking that if he stated his opinion he’d be fined and wouldn’t be able to feed his wife or his dog in the upcoming weeks.
The Rugby Media has not been so reserved, with endless column space devoted to criticism of Gauzere’s widely considered poor performance. Accusations of anti-English bias in officiating have circulated, and the suggestion that the ‘elite’ French referee contingent, featuring Gauzere, Poite, Raynal and Garces who regularly get the biggest International and Domestic games, are simply just not good enough has resurfaced.
So what actually is the truth about all this?
Gauzere’s first half nightmare
Gauzere’s first half performance was so poor that Welsh pundits, players and supporters were unanimous in acknowledging they’d been the beneficiaries of incorrect calls.
England were on the wrong side of Gauzere’s whistle early on with Itoje a major culprit in early petty indiscipline. When Wales were awarded a penalty 20 metres in front of the posts, Farrell was summoned by the Frenchman to talk with his players and try to improve the situation.
England were in a huddle discussing the matter by their own posts, expecting Wales to kick for goal, only to find to their horror a few seconds later, that Pascal Guazere had called time on, and Dan Biggar had spotted an opportunity and kicked the ball 30 metres to the unmarked Josh Adams, who dotted down in the corner for the game’s opening try.
It was of course ridiculous. Gauzere had given England about 2 seconds warning that he was putting time on to disperse from their huddle, and by the time they had realised what was going on it was too late. Great opportunism and execution from Biggar, poor game awareness from England who should’ve waited for the referee to point to the posts before assuming a kick at goal, however really poor officiating from Gauzere.
To tell a captain to huddle his team up and chat about discipline, then not give them time to reform in defence before allowing Wales to exploit the situation to score a try was ridiculous. You wouldn’t expect to see it from a referee in a U10 Minis match let alone a Six Nations International. Gauzere however deflected Farrell’s complaints away and the try was awarded much to just about everybody’s bemusement.
Only ten minutes later, and Wales’ second try of the game was even more incredulous.
Louis Rees-Zammit failed to collect a Josh Adams kick stabbed through, and lost control of the ball forward. Giving his forward momentum, the ball which travelled forward from his hands hit his legs inadvertently, travelled forwards and was collected by Liam Williams who collected and scored.
Everybody stopped assuming a knock-on, including Rees-Zammit whose body language made it clear that he believed he’d lost the ball forward. However Gauzere after consultation with his assistant decided to refer the decision to the TMO, and gave an on-field decision of ‘Try’, as he hadn’t seen a clear knock on.
The TMO after watching several replays seemed to pass the buck on by saying to Gauzere he also hadn’t seen a clear knock on, and to stay with his on-field decision.
The law of course is if you lose control of the ball forward, unless you regain control of the ball by either catching it or intentionally kicking it on before it hits the ground or an opposition player, it is a knock on.
If for example a fly half fumbles a pass from the scrum half, but fly-hacks the ball forward before it touches the ground, that isn’t a knock on, as he has kicked the ball deliberately, and that is considered a ‘regaining of control’. This however wasn’t the case here, as the ball hit Rees Zammit inadvertently.
It was a knock on as everybody who has played Rugby knew intuitively, however the entire French officiating crew didn’t seem to know the law, and confused by proceedings decided awarding the try was the safest course of action.
Anti-English Bias
Having been on the wrong end of the referee’s interpretation of events in 3 World Cup Finals, 2003, 2007 and 2019 namely, a lot of England fans are beginning to question with their unpopularity in the wider Rugby world is sub-consciously impacting actual referee’s decisions.
I would however urge caution when moving into such conspiratorial territory. As a Twickenham debenture holder, I can assure that you on numerous occasions over the years, we have benefitted from poor refereeing decisions sometimes over the course of entire games. Our win against Australia in 2018 springs to mind, when several key decisions went against the Wallabies and we ran out comfortable winners from a game that was very tight for an hour.
Home team and big nation bias are very real phenomenon in Rugby just like other sports. Home advantage and the pressure both the crowd and the expectation the home side has of victory subconsciously influences referees in key marginal decisions.
Retired referees have spoken of this phenomenon, the aura of officiating the All-Blacks, the pressure 80,000 people at Twickenham put on you. Referees also go into games with preconceived notions of which side has superiority in certain areas, no matter how much they try and referee only what they see. Going into a Springbok game, International referees will know they have one of the World’s best scrums and leading scrummaging props. If the scrum is collapsing, this will influence their perception of who the culprit is, no matter how much they try and be completely objective.
This very real phenomenon impacts smaller nations and away teams disproportionately, and England fans moaning about being serial victims of officiating are talking nonsense. Yes over the years in Cardiff, in Dublin, in Paris, we’ve been on the wrong end of the referee’s interpretation. But I promise you as any Welsh, Irish or French fan will attest they’ve suffered a similar fate many times at Twickenham. And any fan of a non-tier one nation such as Italy will tell you how badly they’ve fared in the officiating lottery against the global superpowers.
Any England fan claiming serial victimhood by officials in International Rugby is talking nonsense. Yes we’ve been unlucky that some of the games we’ve been on the wrong end of the whistle have been such high profile and importance matches, such as World Cup finals, but it is not a trend that has continued against us over a huge sample of matches over many years, and it is certainly not a conspiracy or a manifestation of our unpopularity.
Refereeing Standards Not In Decline
Contrary to a widely stated myth, there is little actual evidence that officiating is worse now than it was twenty years ago.
There are still awful mistakes as Saturday showed and there are games where sides are undoubtedly on the wrong end of a referee’s interpretation and whistle repeatedly.
However refereeing now is more accurate than ever before, and the introduction TMO has helped clearly things out of the game like punching and stamping.
Red cards for contacting players in the air who land on their head or neck has helped largely remove a dangerous feature from the professional game, and the officials have now honed in on dangerous clean-outs to the head as the next concussion risk in the game that needs to be eliminated by consistent application of sanction.
Both domestically in England, France and the Pro14 we have dozens of referees with extensive experience who have the trust and respect of the professional player pool, as is also the case in the Southern Hemisphere.
Populist phrases like Rugby referees are awful are easy to throw around, but they don’t actually align with the reality of the situation. Refereeing is the only job on a Rugby field where if you do 20 things right and 1 thing badly wrong, the 1 thing you did wrong is all anyone will talk about. That’s the pressure referees are under, they’re human not robots and they do make mistakes. Gauzere had a really bad game on Saturday, he’ll know that deep down as well as anyone, but that doesn’t detract from the dozens of games he’s officiated well or suddenly make him a bad referee.
Are French Refs just not as good?
Raynal, Gauzere, Garces and Poite often come in for extra criticism from the English Rugby community.
I think a lot of the criticism is unjust of four established International referees, although I do acknowledge that they have had a disproportionate amount of incidents that I would put in the ‘enormous error’ category compared to the elite English speaking referee pool.
Roman Poite reversing a decision to give New Zealand a penalty for offside at the end of the third Lions’ test that likely decided the series was a prime example of this. He seemed influenced by Warburton’s complaints, and unwilling to give a decision with such big implications.
For years a player deliberately playing the ball in front of a team-mate who has knocked the ball on had been awarded as a penalty both at domestic and international level, and it seemed a very clear decision, so for him to buck the trend and actually change his mind having awarded the penalty initially at that exact moment seemed a bit weak.
The French elite referees struggle with having empathy for the game and allowing play to flow at times. They’re incredibly quick to penalise people for not rolling away and the concept of refereeing the ‘clear and obvious’ appears lost on them at times.
Mathieu Raynal penalised Italy 17 times in Rome against Ireland on Saturday, and awarded almost 30 penalties throughout the game. That doesn’t even include the penalty advantages he gave that didn’t result in penalties being awarded. To say he was meticulous is an understatement and Gauzere and his touch-judges followed suit in Cardiff later in the afternoon with minor transgressions not significantly impacting the play that could’ve been ignored immediately penalised.
I would love to say that all the criticism levelled at French referees is just unjustified chatter but having watched a huge amount of Rugby over the past years I don’t think they’re at the same standard as the elite English speaking referees.
That’s not to say they’re bad by any means, we’re still talking about people who have risen to the very top of Rugby officiating, however if World Rugby wants its appointments to be purely meritocratic right now they shouldn’t be getting the very biggest games on such a frequent basis.
World Rugby that analyses referee’s performances and makes these decisions clearly don’t agree with me, and my opinion is certainly not objective fact. I would once again underline that we’re still talking about some of the very best referees in the World, and anybody who disputes that simply doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
The fact referees can’t officiate International games involving their own country of origin means the officiating pool is significantly narrowed, and Wayne Barnes would’ve surely refereed the 2019 World Cup final after Nigel Owens’ injury if England hadn’t featured in the game.
Widening the pool of talented referees
Rugby needs to keep bringing through young talented referees, and offer them incentives to commit to the profession despite all the hassle it undoubtedly brings. Super Rugby opting to not fly South African referees to Australasia to officiate matches for cost-cutting purposes is an illustration of the sort of mentality that’s holding officiating back.
The RFU recently made the ridiculous decision to render JP Doyle, the second best official in the Premiership after Wayne Barnes redundant, in order to ‘cut costs’, seemingly out of the blue. What sort of message does that send to junior referees? Work hard, get to the top, officiate Premiership finals, but we still might axe you out of the blue and not even offer you a good explanation.
The governing bodies of Rugby need to make an unequivocal commitment to funding, backing and promoting officiating as an integral part of the game and improving routes into refereeing. When I see amateur level Rugby, it is very often middle aged men who are refereeing as a way to stay fit and stay involved with a sport they love. This is an indication of a dearth of young people choosing to get into refereeing and for the aforementioned reasons it’s easy to see why.
Conclusion
Gauzere’s performance on Saturday was a horror-show. He’ll hate reviewing the footage more than anyone. But don’t listen to false nostalgic calls for a return of the ‘good old days’ of refereeing where minor knock-ons were ignored, punches weren’t sanctioned, and transgressions were missed.
If someone starts telling you today’s referees are rubbish, and that referees thirty years ago were better, and that we need to scrap the current elite referee pool and get ex-players to start refereeing instead, please please ignore them. They’re talking nonsense. They may really believe what they’re saying but they are objectively wrong.
And if anyone starts spouting off about an ant-English conspiracy that exists for whatever reason, tell them to watch Michael Cheika’s press conferences after his six consecutive defeats to England from 2016-2018.
England have a real problem with discipline, it manifested itself in the 2018 6 game losing run and it’s doing so now as England find themselves in another rut. Trying to blame others won’t solve the problem.
MPRL Sports 