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SPIRO: Rugby needs better refereeing, not more referees

20th May, 2015
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It's time for a serious shake up in south African rugby, and Super Rugby in general. (AFP PHOTO / Michael Bradley)
Expert
20th May, 2015
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2616 Reads

Stephen Larkham was a great rugby player and is making a decent fist of coaching the Brumbies, but his advocacy of a two-referee system for rugby, similar to that used in the NRL, is perplexing and worrying. And it is wrong.

It is perplexing because rugby already has three referees, the field referee and two assistant referees on the sidelines. And we mustn’t forget the TMO, an official who has been given an inch and has become a ruler, and in recent instances has tried to supplant the supremacy of the field referee.

Rather than plonking yet another official into an already crowded house, more thought should be given to a better use of the officials already present in a major rugby match.

I am thinking mainly about the way the scrum, the major area of stoppages and penalties, is policed. It beats me why the nearest assistant referee cannot come on to the field of play and referee the side of the scrum the referee is not standing on.

It is a joke right now that it is invariably the side of the scrum the referee is not on that collapses. Put the assistant referee closer to the other side and there would be far fewer collapses of scrums.

World Rugby (formerly known as the IRB) needs also to bring in the full Experimental Law Variations (ELVs) provisions, where a short-arm penalty was the first sanction available to a referee.

While they are at it, World Rugby should also bring back the other ELVs rule that allowed pulling down of the maul. The reason offered by South Africa and England for kicking this ELV out was that it would create injuries. Nonsense. In all the time I’ve watched rugby I have never seen a major injury from a pulled down maul.

Allowing the maul to be pulled down, just as runners are allowed to be pulled down, would restore some of the balance between the effectiveness of the maul (enhanced by the ‘illegal’ allowance of mauler blocking in front of the ball) and the lack of effectiveness of any legal way to stop a properly set-up maul.

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This is why the call for a second field referee is wrong. It will actually contribute to the problem in rugby of too many stoppages, rather than allow for the flow of the game.

Rugby is not like gridiron or even league where the ruck/line of scrimmage is formally set after every phase. Particularly in gridiron, having multiple referees on the field does not affect the flow of play because there is a stop-start flow pattern to that game, rather than the phase pattern of stop-start-start-start (perhaps going on a dozen or more times) and then another stop.

Larkham seems to be reflecting the thinking of his boss, ACT Brumbies chief executive Michael Jones, who was reported in the Sun-Herald as saying: “There has been some discussion (about) two referees and how that would be divvied up. There is certainly some merit in that. We need a whole game approach…”

This is a worrying statement. There is, in fact, no merit in having two field referees. Moreover, there is a great deal of merit in limiting the powers of the TMO to dictate the outcomes of games by torturing the video date with endless replays until, like water torture, the disbelieving field referee finally cracks.

Take the incident in the 70th minute of the Waratahs-Sharks match last weekend. The Sharks were eight points down. Sibusiso Sithole burst down the flank, and seemingly beat the cover with a powerful dive for a try in the corner.

Enter TMO George Ayoub. First the issue of Kurtley Beale using his shoulder illegally to stop Sithole was dismissed without any review. The significance of this was that if the try was disallowed but the shoulder charge upheld, then it would have been a penalty try to be converted from in front of the posts rather than from the sidelines.

Ayoub proceeded to go through the try millisecond by millisecond. He finally found a blob which he claimed was a knee on the ground. And on this shaky evidence, the try was overruled. The Sharks remained eight points adrift rather than needing only a penalty or a dropped goal to win the match.

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We had an equally puzzling decision from TMO Vinny Munro in disallowing a penalty to the Chiefs at Wellington with time almost up. The visitors needed a try to defeat the home side, the Hurricanes, when a Hurricanes player clearly played the ball while being on the ground in a tumultuous ruck.

How the referee Glen Jackson allowed Munro to even put forward the proposition that Sam Cane somehow lost the ball through his own mistake is unbelievable.

I want SANZAR to answer a few questions.

First, why is it that the home team, in New Zealand, South Africa and Australia, invariably gets the benefit of the TMOs torturing the evidence? I can’t recall a TMO torturing the evidence to help the cause of a visiting side. Perhaps a Roar reader can help out here?

Second, what is SANZAR going to do about putting these upstart TMOs back in their box? My suggestion is that the referee tells the TMO what he is seeing. Craig Joubert does this. It has the effect in most cases of being officious TMOs back in their boxes.

I said that the ACT Brumbies chief executive Michael Jones was on the wrong track with his suggestion that two field referees is a good way to improve the rugby spectacle. This is nonsense. I point to a recent interview given by the former Springbok coach Nick Mallett on News24.com following last weekend’s weekend of losses by South African teams.

Roll the tape.

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“At half-time we heard Naka Drotske, the Cheetahs coach, say it’s back to basics. So for the first 10 minutes of the second half we saw driving mauls and up-and-unders. And it was strange that they were kicking up-and-unders on Patrick Osborne because he’s a very big guy.

“The coaching you get in New Zealand is very different from what you get here. At practice they will put players into situations that they’ll face in the game. They will play attack against defence… And they get the attack to choose the right option in relation to the defence they’re confronted with.

“(But in South Africa) it’s all pre-programed and it’s easy to telegraph…”

The Brumbies, especially in the days of Jakeball, were the epitome of this South African crash-ball, penalty-obsessed system of trying to play rugby.

So here’s a suggestion to Michael Jones. Why don’t you insist on the Brumbies playing like the free-running, smart Brumbies of old, in the days of Larkham, George Gregan, Joe Roff and all the other brilliant runners?

Or if this a too-distant memory, why not try to play like the Hurricanes, who are not only leading the Super Rugby tournament in competition points but are miles in front of any other team this year in the entertainment and spectacle factor.

The Hurricanes are proving that clever, ball-in-hand rugby is winning rugby, much as the Waratahs showed last season.

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Post-script
The rugby media has noted that Rohan Hoffman and Glen Jackson have been seemingly relegated to the assistant referee roles, and Vinnie Munro given a total break.

I notice, too, that George Ayoub is not in his usual place as TMO for the Waratahs-Crusaders match and has been replaced by Peter Marshall.

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