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Give them a break, no referee means no game

NRL referees are under the blowtorch as usual. (AAP Image/Action Photographics, Robb Cox)
Roar Guru
22nd May, 2015
28

Umpires and referees are human and make mistakes. When a rugby player misses a tackle and his opponent scores a try, you are annoyed but you don’t hurl abuse at the player.

In AFL, if your team misses a shot on goal, you forget about it and move on. In soccer, how many shots are skied well over the crossbar to be forgotten in the next play?

Yet the umpires and referees are regularly brought into the spotlight for their mistakes and rarely praised when they get it right.

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Full disclosure, I am an umpire. I umpire in field hockey for both men’s and women’s games at a club level. I am currently getting my hours up before I get Level One accreditation and do first/second grade matches.

I’ll start with my own personal experiences, and bring it back around to the professional leagues later. At domestic club level, you get a ‘luck of the draw’ with umpires. They are club appointed, and sometimes are players that have literally been handed a whistle and sent out. They will make errors, and miss penalties.

I regularly talk with senior players and other umpires about my mistakes so I can learn and grow as an umpire. The only way to practice umpiring is to do it. There are videos, but unless you are running for an hour, legs sore, dodging players to get in position it’s hard to mimic.

What never ceases to amaze me is that players think they can either influence an umpire to change their calls unjustly, or outright abuse the umpires for making a decision. As I stated earlier, the umpires will make mistakes. But once we make a decision, we need to stand by it.

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Yelling obscenities at us isn’t going to help (and that player saw a yellow card with threat of red one). All it does is undermines the umpire’s confidence, and leads them to making more errors. At club level, safety is number one priority for umpires, then the application of the rules. If the environment isn’t safe, then we aren’t doing our jobs.

Moving back to the professional arena, I look at the AFL, and a regular column on the Herald that picks apart bad umpiring calls from the weekend. Normally there are about six to eight calls that really stand out. An AFL game goes for 120 minutes, and they find six to eight errors across nine games that go for 120 minutes.

Bearing in mind, the commentators/fans have benefit of a replay, and multiple different camera angles. The umpires have their eyes, players in front of them, kilometres of running in their legs, and only one non-controlling umpire to give them advice. Hardly a fair playing field.

Yet those lowlight reels don’t show how many clangers and mistakes all the players made. All the balls kicked out on the full, the sloppy tackles, or even how many times the umpires were totally correct are ignored. It is just an exercise in bashing the umpires for the purpose of gaining viewers and subscribers.

The video ref in the NRL is the other main point of discussion. I could spend an entire article discussing the act of players staying down to get decisions reviewed, but I’ll save that one for another day. The relationship between the on-field referees and the video ref is an interesting one. The on-field refs make decisions based on what the controlling, non-controlling and touchies see and hear. And with all this information, they throw it to one side to let someone else decide.

Where the aggravation from fans comes in, is that the on-field guys, in the same vain as the AFL umpires, have two eyes, and a couple of opinions made on the spot. The video ref has all the replays from the host broadcaster at their disposal to make the correct decision. The problem is, the video refs are required to apply rules to the exact letter of the law (see Canberra’s Blake Austin no try).

A technically correct decision might not be in the spirit of the rule, but it is still the correct one. The on-field ref may allow something to slide based on the interpretation of the rule, but the video ref sees it differently.

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This sends the players and fans into a frenzy of abuse against the refs for their decisions. It is a technically correct decision from the video ref, but if the on-field referee didn’t send it upstairs you would get a different decision entirely. It undermines the on-field referee’s confidence in his or her own decisions and makes them more inclined to send decisions upstairs or make more mistakes.

The main point to take away from this, though, is that without the umpires and referees there is no game. Across all grades and all codes. You don’t have to like their decisions, but please try to respect them. As a player, I always make it a point to shake the umpire’s hand after the game and thank them for coming out and officiating. If local clubs can’t find umpires and referees to train and bring up through the ranks then the professional level codes will suffer.

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