‘Merit before nationality’ referee system won’t work

 
Spiro Zavos Columnist

By , 18 Feb 2009 Spiro Zavos is a Roar Expert

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Queensland's Sean Hardman is tackled during the Super 14 match between the Queensland Reds and the South African Stormers in Brisbane. AAP Image/Dave Hunt.

SANZAR has got itself into a mess with its ‘ground-breaking’ new system of a Merit Panel of nine referees who will be allocated matches on merit before nationality.

What this means is that referees from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa will officiate in matches involving Super 14 teams from their own country even when they are playing teams from the other two countries.

The mess is that it is inevitable that referees under the merit before nationality system will be forced to defend their impartiality rather than their decisions.

This will place our best referees under intolerable pressure to prove a negative – that they are not biased towards their own countrymen. This sort of pressure is an unacceptable burden for Super 14 referees to have to bear.

SANZAR has sold this new system on the argument that “the best players will be refereed by the best officials.”

I call this new system a noble experiment because it turns back the clock on the issue of the neutrality of referees more than twenty years to a time when referees even at the international level were not neutral.

The experiment ignores why the nationality test was introduced.

The fact is that, before professional rugby and before the nationality test, a number of referees in all the major rugby countries were biased. The Lions, for instance, complained about a now-dead Queensland referee during one of their tours of Australia that when he was asked by the Lions halfback whose ball was it for the put-in, replied, pointing towards the home side, “It’s ours.”

And South African Test referees up to the 1976 had to be members of the secret Afrikaaner society, the Broederbond.

The Broederbond had a calling to entrench Afrikaaner culture into every aspect of South African life. It saw the triumphs of the Springboks as a sign of God’s blessing on their work.

Nelson Mandela reports in his autobiography that even though he had no radio or newspapers in his prison, he knew when the Springboks had lost a Test as the food that Saturday evening was even more appalling than normal.

It is already clear that after only one round of the Super 14 tournament, the noble experiment of going back to the future is not working.

The irony is that a system that places merit above nationality has led to veiled and muted criticisms of the referees about their allegiances. The New Zealand television commentators during the Hurricanes-Waratahs match, in particular, but also in the Highlanders-Brumbies match (during which Grant Fox was a model of fairness and insight), and in the Force-Blues match, seemed to be straining not to link decisions favorable to the visitors to the nationality of the referees.

But how long will this restraint last? And why expose referees to this sort of unfair pressure?

Let’s make one point very clear in all of this: the professionalism of modern referees concerning their impartiality is uncontestable. Modern referees do not favour one side over another on grounds of allegiances. And any discussion about the merit before nationality system must take place with the acknowledgment that modern referees might make contentious decisions, but that these decisions are not made to help one team defeat another team, for whatever reason.

Moreover, SANZAR has an extremely rigorous assessment panel which examines the performance of all the Super 14 referees with great care to ensure that the decision-making is accurate and fair.

So any discussion about the referees and the decisions they make in the noble experiment MUST accept that their impartiality is a given.

Aside from allowing its best referees to be unfairly targeted, the merit before nationality system is flawed in the composition of its Merit Panel.

The original panel had four South Africans (Marius Jonker, Craig Joubert, Jonathan Kaplan and Mark Lawrence), three Australians (Stuart Dickinson, James Leckie and Matt Goddard) and two New Zealanders (Steve Walsh and Bryce Lawrence).

Walsh has not been allowed to referee in the Super 14 this year for disciplinary reasons, apparently.

The skew towards the South African referees (who I regard along with Dickinson as the best of the Super 14 referees) means that New Zealand sides, particularly, and also Australian sides in South Africa, could be refereed by a referee from South Africa in most of their games.

The problem with this, as Darryl pointed out in a comment on a recent thread on The Roar, is not a lack of impartiality on the part of the referees, but the perception that “justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.”

It’s been noted that in the first round of the Super 14, all the sides that had a countryman/referee won. Three of victories were away victories, too.

But too much shouldn’t be seen in this.

I took the Sydney Morning Herald’s tipping experts as a sort of test and all the winning teams were favoured to win by these experts; Brumbies 8 votes to 3 over the Highlanders; the Blues 7 to 4 over the Force; Waratahs 6 to 5 over the Hurricanes; and the Bulls 8 to 3 over the Reds.

All the Super 14 coaches apparently supported the noble experiment before the tournament started.

I was talking to an insider some weeks ago about the change and the support it had from the coaches. “They’re supporting it now,” he said, “but how supportive will they be when they start losing games.”

And that’s the real issue.

In a sport with laws that are complex and where subjectivity in the application of these laws, on the run, is required under the advantage law, the referees, even the best, will always be subjected to second-guessing on their decisions.

It would be interesting to hear from the referees on this.

But it seems to me that it is just not fair to these referees to add a further complication of nationality to the second-guessing and the appraisal of their performance.

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