English Rugby gets a look at the new IRB rules

The Aviva Premiership season kicked off on Saturday with a double-header at Twickenham: Wasps vs Harlequins and Saracens vs London Irish. These matches were played with the new law tweaks introduced by the IRB and I watched both.

Wasps were nearly relegated last season, while Quins finished champions, so most pundits saw Wasps losing. Wasps did indeed lose but not quite in the way anyway expected.

They actually scored 20 unanswered points with barely 10 minutes on the clock. Early in the second half, they led by 40-13 points and looked set for a famous win.

Quins then ran riot and scored 29 unanswered points, including a late Nick Evans penalty to give his side the lead for the first time in the match. Quins won 40-42.

It was a good advert for the game, if slightly surreal. Since the match was televised, of more general interest to Roarers is that English rugby got a look at the new Television Match Official (TMO) review powers under those law tweaks.

The first incident came at the end of the first half. Wasps flyhalf, Nicky Robinson, popped a short pass to the centres from just inside his own half, and then the ball was spread wide to the left where winger Tom Varndell went over for the score.

Handshakes all round, but the referee was already consulting with his assistant, who thought there may have been a forward pass in the move. Cue the TMO.

The first thing TV viewers were greeted with was a sight of the TMO himself. A box popped up on the screen as if our man was making a Skype call into the match. TMOs will need to be looking their best if that is standard procedure.

It had been a good move by Wasps and looked like an attractive score. Forward passes are notoriously difficult to judge from TV angles so there was some trepidation about how the TMO would interpret the footage. Would he need categorical evidence of a forward pass to deny the try, or would he instead want certainty the pass was good to allow it?

On the advice of his assistant, the referee had asked the TMO to look at a specific passage of play. As it turned out, Robinson’s pop pass was clearly forward and the try was not awarded. So, all good, yes?

Well, not completely. There were some dissenting voices immediately. Commentator Austin Healey took almost an aesthetic dislike to the new powers, hating the fact that a good-looking back line move was called back after going as far as the try line. He wondered why the assistant referee hadn’t just flagged the forward pass when he saw it.

On Twitter, Clive Woodward was concerned that assistant referees might start to follow the ball rather than watching for incidents behind play, thus potentially missing foul play.

Elsewhere, Brian Moore declared that anything which annoyed Austin Healey had to be a force for good, and asked Woodward what grounds he had to believe assistants would change how they watch a game. (Interestingly, Woodward appears to have deleted his tweets on the matter. They weren’t really controversial, so it’s likely he just didn’t want to become the focus for the debate).

By and large, most accepted the right decision had been made. In the second half, though, it was noticeable that players started to draw the referee’s attention to offences they believed they had taken place in the lead-up to subsequent scores. This hadn’t happened at all in the first half.

The referee is not supposed to respond to player appeals and, in this match anyway, he waved them away.

However, this kind of pressure could become a feature, and it’s possible officials might have to take action against players who protest too vehemently.

It was also striking that the crowd became more active in chorusing “forward”, whenever the opposition gave a flat pass, as if to let the referee know he should be prepared to go back should a try result.

This match saw two other TMO referrals. There was a chance a Wasps player had gone into touch before giving a scoring pass. He hadn’t, and the try was awarded. In the other incident, Nick Evans kicked across field for Quins full back Mike Brown to collect the ball and score. Here, the issue was whether Brown was onside, and it’s the type of review you often see in rugby league.

One problem with crossfield kicks is getting both players in the same frame. Our first view appeared to show Brown’s head at the bottom of the screen in what seemed like an onside position. Players on the pitch could see this on the stadium screen and Evans lined up the conversion.

For some reason, the TMO wasn’t completely convinced and looked at other angles. Play was held up for some moments, drawing impatient jeers from the crowd, until he concluded there was no better view, and allowed the try.

Wayne Barnes was referee in the second match of the opening double-header between Saracens and London Irish, which Saracens won.

He quickly went to the TMO twice. The first instance was another pop pass to put Saracens captain Steve Borthwick under the posts for a try. It was forward, and so no try. In the second, Saracens flyhalf was flattened by a tackle and Barnes asked for an opinion on whether it was illegal. The TMO thought it was. It looked a bit high but the tackler mainly failed to use his arms.

There were two points of note here. When the TMO ruled the tackle was illegal, Barnes replied “Yes, I saw it on the screen, and I agree”. He then issued a yellow card. That raises the question of what he would have done if he hadn’t agreed with the TMO’s opinion. I assume he would have had to award the penalty but could have held back on the yellow.

Or maybe he could have just overruled the TMO, I don’t know. After all, not every ground has a screen for officials on the pitch to see replays so perhaps he doesn’t have any discretion.

The second point is, it was clear Barnes saw both offences himself. He didn’t require his assistants to bring them up. Last season, he would have just whistled for both. In this match, it appears he used the TMO to confirm what he already suspected.

At the tail end of the game, Barnes called for further TMO reviews for the final two tries. Before the law change, I’m sure he would have given both without hesitation. No forward passes were spotted and both were given. One ESPN commentator was disappointed that Barnes wasn’t prepared to make the call himself.

(Barnes, of course, does have some history with the question of forward passes).

It was noticeable under the old laws, that referees had begun to ask for TMO opinions on tries even when the pitch officials were in the best position to judge. If more follow Barnes, then supporters may have to get used to the possibility that virtually every try, and maybe most heavy tackles, will come to be referred.

On Saturday, the referees were directing the TMO to look at particular passages of play, not the whole build-up. I strongly suspect there will be “review creep”.

After all, we saw last year TMO Johan Meuwesen going beyond his brief to advise against a Jimmy Cowan try for New Zealand against South Africa in Port Elizabeth. Meuwesen had seen the clear forward pass from Dagg, had no authority to speak on the matter, but got an opportunity when the referee asked him about the separate issue of the grounding.

On one of the Saracens tries Barnes asked the TMO to look at “the last two passes”. As it turned out, there was a pass prior to those two which looked flat. Barnes probably had that pass in mind anyway, and was just a bit imprecise. There were around five or six quick passes so it’s not always easy to keep count.

Indeed, the TMO proceeded to scrutinize the third pass back before concluding it was good (as were the last two). It’s not difficult to imagine in the future a TMO spotting an infringement he hasn’t been asked to look at and deciding to flag it. It would be less of a leap than Meuwesen took last year.

This, of course, raises the question of how far back in play you go. After the first match at Twickenham, Harlequins head coach Conor O’Shea happened to say he thought one of Wasps’ tries originated with an illegal turnover. He wasn’t complaining, just noting how his team hadn’t really got any breaks while going 27 points behind.

The interviewer seized on his comment and asked whether he would have liked to see the TMO involved. O’Shea looked surprised at the suggestion and said he wouldn’t. He saw it as just the rub of the green.

Other coaches might well see things differently. So, how far back can we go? Is the whole passage of play, from the point a team gains possession to when it scores, up for review? That could be a mighty number of phases but a lot of it will be down to how a game is officiated.

Officials now have some choices to make about how they referee a game. Before the law changes, if you saw a questionable pass, you decided to call it out, or give it the benefit of the doubt and play on. Whichever way you went, there was no going back.

Now, referees have a possible third choice. “There’s a chance that pass was forward but I’m not sure. I’ll play on but go back to it if there’s a try”. There must be a temptation to start doing this. It keeps the game flowing, which generally makes for a better spectacle. It also allows a referee to avoid making a decision about which he isn’t completely certain.

We could end up with a kind of “reverse advantage”. A team the referee thinks may have infinged gets to keep the ball if a try looks likely because he can go back and get the TMO to take a better look.

But that could be end up being as much as a minute or more of play. Will a referee really go that far back? If he does, then a try might be disallowed but the defending side will have suffered a big disadvantage. Firstly, they will have spent that time wearing themselves out tackling. Secondly, the minute won’t get added back to the clock. For them, it will be a minute out of the game without the ball.

If, on the other hand, a try is scored and the referee doesn’t go back then, by default, he decides the questionable play was OK. If you are a streetwise team, and you know you’ve thrown a forward pass in a move which wasn’t called, it will be in your interests to set up a series of grinding phases to “clear the slate” and put some distance between the pass and a potential scoring opportunity later.

Both outcomes are undesirable, but very possible if referees are tempted to hold off on tight calls instead of blowing them up, or decisively judging them legal.

When the new review powers were introduced, I think most of us saw them as just an extra check in the context of the game as we already know it. After just two televised matches here in England, it seems clear they’ll raise as many questions as they seek to answer, and may end up with some important unintended consequences. We might be embarking on a strange journey while we digest them.