The glorious and overcomplicated world of rugby laws

Anyone who’s read my stuff for long enough will know that I’m loath to criticise referees. I simply don’t let them have an impact on the way I watch games, nor do I let them affect my enjoyment or otherwise.

I feel the same way about commentators, for what it’s worth. Essentially, my focus is on the players and the rugby.

Therefore, it’s a rare event that I’ll comment on refereeing decisions, and I honestly can’t recall ever holding one responsible for the result of a match (that’s not about to change, for the record).

But all this is not to say that refs are immune to criticism. When they get something so clearly wrong, they should be (and are, I would like to hope) held to account.

» CEO stood down: What the hell is going on at the Brumbies?

So when Jaco Peyper told Brumbies winger Joe Tomane, while waiting for TMO Marius Jonker’s recommendation around a try being scored by Stormers winger Dillyn Leyds, that “he doesn’t have to have control”, you naturally go into a state of ‘did I just hear what I think I heard?’

And I did hear it; we all heard it. A referee with nearly 30 Tests and more that 60 Super Rugby matches to his name was trying to explain that control is not needed when grounding the ball in-goal.

Tomane: “No control?”

Peyper: “He carrying it, so he doesn’t have to have control. When you carry it, you just have to be in contact with it. It’s when you’re not carrying it…”

Tomane (as the replays appear on-screen): “He’s lost it.”

Peyper: “It’s whether he stays in contact with it.

“It’s not about control when you carry it. You have to be in contact with it. It’s when the ball is already in-goal, just have to stay in contact with it.”

TMO Marius Jonker: “Jaco, I’ve got a decision for you.”

Peyper: “Can you see whether he’s still carrying it?”

Jonker: “Jaco, it’s not clear that there’s any separation from ball to hand, so you may award the try.”

Peyper (to Brumbies co-captains Stephen Moore and Christian Leali’ifano): “It’s a try. There’s no clear separation between arm and ball, therefore it’s a try. He’s carrying it, so it’s not a control issue.”

(Awards try. Leyds’ surprised and then bemused face appears on screen.)

I’m sure I wasn’t alone in consulting the Laws of the Game over the weekend as a result of this decision and attempted explanation. Law 9 says that a try is scored when “an attacking player is first to ground the ball in the opponents’ in-goal.” But what constitutes grounding the ball?

Law 22.1 Grounding the ball

“There are two ways a player can ground the ball:

(a) Player touches the ground with the ball. A player grounds the ball by holding the ball and touching the ground with it, in in-goal. ‘Holding’ means holding in the hand or hands, or in the arm or arms. No downward pressure is required.

(b) Player presses down on the ball. A player grounds the ball when it is on the ground in the in-goal and the player presses down on it with a hand or hands, arm or arms, or the front of the player’s body from waist to neck inclusive.”

Peyper is indeed correct; no control is actually needed. How you ground the ball without control is perhaps a whole other argument, but by the letter of the law, control is not needed. Neither is downward pressure, which if you recall the Jed Holloway try from the Waratahs game – and I’ll come back to it shortly – you might remember Fox Sports’ Rod Kafer saying it was hard to see any downward pressure.

Note, the law doesn’t actually use the word ‘carry’ either. The keywords here are “‘Holding’ means holding in the hand or hands, or in the arm or arms”, and this is what I suspect Peyper meant.

But you also can’t ‘hold’ the ball with the back of the wrist or the forearm, which is the only way Leyds maintained contact. And he clearly didn’t maintain contact, evidenced by the fact he told his teammates and the referee that he’d knocked the ball on (and therefore, a TMO referral wasn’t needed).

On that topic:

Definition: Knock-on (from Law 12 – Knock-on or Throw forward

“A knock-on occurs when a player loses possession of the ball and it goes forward, or when a player hits the ball forward with the hand or arm, or when the ball hits the hand or arm and goes forward, and the ball touches the ground or another player before the original player can catch it.

“‘Forward’ means towards the opposing team’s dead ball line.”

So this is where the issue of separation comes in. Jonker said he couldn’t see any separation from ball and arm, and therefore there was no knock-on. I can’t tell you how many times I hit the pause button to get these still shots, but I’d argue there is separation evident in both angles.

I initially had doubts about the try prop Vincent Koch scored a few minutes later – and for the same reason – but repeat viewings showed that he was at least still holding the ball in the bend of his wrist and against his forearm, and that he did in fact ground it before the ball came loose.

Even though Peyper tried to tangle us up about control, there’s no way Leyds grounded that ball, because there’s no way he was holding it in the first place. And if he lost possession, it had to be a knock-on. Which was what he tried to tell Peyper from the start.

But… And there’s always a but.

Once we move on from the small detail of the ball being held or carried, if Jonker couldn’t see clear separation, then he had to tell Peyper to award the try. Because the TMO protocols tell us that if no “clear and obvious” infringement or offence has occurred, “the TMO must advise that an offence has not occurred.”

Which brings me back to the Holloway try in Sydney on Friday night.

The image below shows the ball being grounded on the line, though referee Nick Briant was obviously not in position to see that – he asked TMO Ian Smith, “I need to check, I had no view. Just on the off chance, try or no try, please?”

The image also quite clearly shows a defender’s hand on the ball, though immediately prior to hitting pause where I did, I could see maybe even three different hands on the ball.

Was one of them Holloway’s? Well, we have to assume so, yes, and in line with the TMO protocols, in the absence of clear and obvious evidence that neither attacker nor defender has infringed (or prevented the ball being grounded, in this case), the benefit of the doubt goes to the tryscorer.

So they got that one right; Holloway’s was a good example of the TMO protocols working well. So was Nemani Nadolo’s second try against the Kings in Christchurch, even if the TMO was perhaps asked the wrong question.

In all probability, Nadolo grounded the ball short of the line, but by the time referee Will Houston got to a position where he could see the ball on the line under the pile of bodies, however the ball got to the line had already happened. And in asking TMO Chris Wratt, “Is there any reason I cannot award a try?” Houston didn’t really leave a lot of scope for clear evidence otherwise.

And so again, TMO Wratt could only surmise that Nadolo got the ball on or over the line legally. Had Houston asked, “try or no try?” Wratt may have concluded that Nadolo grounded the ball short, and without any evidence beyond that, he could not definitively say that a try had been scored. He could, of course, have asked Houston if he saw the ball on the line, in which case via consultation, they still award the try. The Schrödinger’s Cat of tries, perhaps?

So out of a weekend of wacky TMO rulings, most were actually right in the end.

Even if you want to debate the wording of what constitutes holding the ball – or that you can be holding the ball without controlling it – there’s not much wrong with that law. And I say that having originally thought that a grounding law that doesn’t mention control is just plain wrong.

The only element I’d argue they got wrong was Marius Jonker’s conclusion that Dillyn Leyds maintained hold of the ball. But even then, if Jonker swore to me black and blue that he couldn’t see any separation between ball and arm, then he made the only call available to him by the latter of the laws and TMO protocols.

And that, friends, is the glorious and overly complicated world in which our match officials operate.