Complaints about the referee should be Cheiked

After every Test match against England, Michael Cheika has complained about the referee in public statements to the press. The purpose of this article is to complain about those complaints.

Cheika is quite right, of course. The referees in all three Test matches made errors. But it is not for him to comment in public about that. All humans make errors. Count the number of errors the Wallabies made during the course of this series and the number and effect of referee errors pales into insignificance.

The thrust of Cheika’s complaints is correct in law. For example, the laws provide that if something occurs not covered by the laws, and it affects play, play should be stopped. It should be restarted by a scrum with the team last in possession having the feed. That is what should have happened when the ball touched spider cam on Saturday night. Ultimately the failure to abide the law lead to an English try.

Another example. In the last minute of the first half of the second Test with the Wallabies belting the English line, Craig Joubert hung his arm out for a penalty to Australia and played advantage for English tackle/ruck infringement. Some 20 phases later when at no stage were the Wallabies any better off than having the penalty, Joubert inexplicably called “advantage over”. The World Rugby Referees’ boss has since said the decision was wrong and so it was.

My point though, is there is absolutely no need for Cheika to complain. It belittles the referee, turns Cheika into a whinger and provides an excuse for the Wallaby team to hang their hat on –
“It wasn’t my fault. It was that blood ref!” None of those things are helpful and are, in fact, detrimental to Wallaby success.

Just watching Cheika’s face in the coaches’ box shows his attitude. His face is petulant child personified when decisions go against him. That flows through to the players. Listening to the on-field complaints, whining and directions to the referee emanating from the Wallaby players is something about which Australians should not be proud.

Nick Phipps, for example, is a serial offender. Stephen Moore has never heard of the book ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People.’ His discussions with the ref are blunt, badly timed and forceful. At one stage Craig Joubert complained about 15 Australians talking to him. On Saturday Nigel Owens told Moore to the effect that he should not tell the referee to sin-bin a player because that was a decision that only the ref could make and he, Moore, was asked to be quiet.

This must stop. If players are concentrating on what the referee is doing they are not concentrating upon what they as individuals must do, what their teammates around them are doing and what the opposition is doing. It is detracting from not only the Wallaby play but, more importantly, its ethos.

Ironically that a stop has not been put to this continual chatter is, as I see it, yet another referee fault. At an early stage in a match the referee has the opportunity to say and follow through with “I have had enough of your chatter. The next man to talk to me apart from your captain will be penalised. I will continue to do this throughout the game culminating in sin bins and sendoffs. Do you understand?” If for one season of professional rugby, back chat penalties came back in vogue, we would have seen the end of this blight on the game by the third round.

The fact of the matter is that during the game, a player’s opinion of the ref is neither valued nor sought. If a ref starting telling a 5/8 that his centre alignment was out, the ref would get short shrift. Yet the same courtesy is not extended by some players to the ref.

Lastly – where is Cheika’s poker face? If he and his players spent more time showing that and less time whingeing and whining about referees, their performances would improve immensely.