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I rather quite enjoyed some time off last week, the first real period of down time for me since probably late January.
For three days, it was patchy mobile reception and whatever Super Rugby score updates TV and radio news bulletins could fit into their timeframe.
And that also meant that as far as I was concerned, there were no issues with refereeing. If I wasn’t hearing about it, it mustn’t have happened.
While away, I managed to catch up on the final round Six Nations game between England and France at Twickenham. Only two months late, sure, but better late than never.
I’m very happy I did, because I finally got to see a famed and thoroughly entertaining game, with England winning 55-35 in a 12-try thriller. England weren’t able to bridge the 26-point differential gap they needed to claim the Six Nations title, but that didn’t make it any less of a game.
And nor did some curious officiating from Nigel Owens on the day. Owens is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the best referees in the game. He has a very good ‘feel’ for the game, and is unparalleled, I think, in the way he addresses players and explains his decisions.
But there were numerous times in this game where I was rather surprised to see things missed, as the game was allowed to flow. So there were a few forward passes – some fairly obvious – some knock-ons, straight-ish lineout throws, and the like. Both teams benefitted, and again, the game certainly did not suffer as a result.
Whether it was a conscious decision from Owens on the day, we’ll never now, but it’s not difficult to conclude that in the final game of the tournament and with the title still in play, he was determined to let the players decide the outcome. I don’t have a lot of problem with this, if I’m honest.
When Billy Vunipola barged over in the 64th minute, converted by George Ford, England needed just eight more unanswered points to take the title. Owens, proving his quality, was in precisely the right spot to award the try immediately, with no collaboration with his assistants and no conversation with the TMO.
Except that Vunipola dropped it – or more precisely, had it prised loose from his grasp as he was falling to the ground over time line. Owens was maybe a metre away from all this, and the leg of French prop Rabah Slimani may have partially obscured him, but Owens looked to have a good enough angle on the play.
He just missed the knock-on, somehow. To say Vunipola was looking sheepish as he walked away is an understatement. It was the look of knowing, and surprisingly, there was very little argument from any of the French defenders involved.
Equally surprising was the lack of TMO correction after several replays, though to be fair Ford didn’t muck around with the conversion. Even Brian Moore in commentary had to eventually concede it was a clear knock-on. Eventually.
The point in all this is that even the very best referees in the game get things wrong on the field.
And I couldn’t help but think of this decisive two-month-old moment over this weekend just gone, when internet servers and Twitter itself began to strain under the load of referee-related anguish coming from all three corners of the SANZAR collective.
It’s fair to say there was much hand-wringing and desk-thumping in Round 14. Fault could be found in most if not all games played over the weekend, and from officials from all three countries.
Who was the worst? It’s hard to say, and doing so doesn’t really achieve anything. And there probably wouldn’t be consensus anyway.
Referees and the decisions they make are more scrutinised than ever before. Every moment in every game can be rewound, paused, reviewed, judged, and sentenced within moments of it happening live.
You may well have heard or read me saying in the past that I really try to ignore referees on the field, and I do. I watch rugby for the rugby, not the officials. But I’m still not immune to a rant.
That’s a rubbish call. There is no way Beale used his arms in that, it was all just about body on body contact.. #WARvSHA
— Brett McKay (@BMcSport) May 16, 2015
Social media, internet forums, super-dooper-mega-ultra high definition TVs, and remote controls are all we need to make our feelings on any single decision known. And it happens every game, every weekend, all season.
So here’s the question for consideration.
Is refereeing really as bad as is being made out, or is the reality that it’s the same as it ever was but just magnified so much more?
It may well be the former; there have been some absolute howlers this season.
But I think the latter is also true, and it’s a classic case of confirmation bias.
We’re reading and hearing more and more that referees and the assistants and the TMOs are all hopeless, and so we watch their decision-making so much more closely to see for ourselves if it’s true. And then we rant about referees being rubbish, fulfil the prophecy, rinse, repeat, and tune in again the following week convinced that all refs are rubbish.
None of this is to excuse the obvious errors made on the weekend. But it is worth thinking about whether we might also be guilty of overemphasising things just a touch.
For everything that happened on the weekend, you can go back to Stuart Berry last year, to Bryce Lawrence in 2011, to Wayne Barnes in 2007, and however many more examples you care to recall. Referees have been wrong in the past, and they’ll be wrong next weekend, too. Until the robots take over, human whistleblowers will make mistakes.
Postscript: Though they didn’t refer to them directly in the media release, it was notable that SANZAR have appointed Rohan Hoffmann as an Assistant Referee only this weekend (in the Force-Highlanders game, to be refereed by Andrew Lees), and that TMOs George Ayoub and Vinny Munro weren’t appointed at all.
In the MR, SANZAR Game Manager Lyndon Bray said, “While we acknowledge that the match officials cannot get it right all of the time, there are some basic standards that have simply not been upheld over this past weekend, resulting in some disappointing decisions and selection consequences.”
Indeed.