Under-fire SANZAAR to launch review into use of TMO

The RA and SANZAAR are really stupid as stupid does. Marinos comes out and talks tripe about referees being more accountable than his refs boss appoints Jackson to referee his old team. They really do the refs no favours.

Fionn the problem is that officials like Ayoub and Peyper are calling shoulder charges to head accidents and in the aftermath the offending players aren't getting banned. You should be aware that there has been a successful law suit made against a highly prominent Rugby school in Dublin. An under age player in Ulster died from head knocks.

Ambiguous, but not, by necessity, wrong then. Is this not the home town advantage we all freely accept? After all, we are all very much aware of home town advantage; the finals structures are even based around the principle that it is easier to win at home than away. Why is that, if not that the ambiguous calls would trend in your way? Note, we are not talking he blatantly incorrect calls, which are another matter, and typically very few of those occur as a percentage.

"...overbiased fans jump on the chea*ting ref scenario far far to easily and quickly as soon as their team is affected" I would correct that jumping on the chea*ting ref chain when their team is impacted negatively. As we saw with MC response in the last RWC, if the ref gets a call wrong and you win, well then, it's just one of those things that happens in rugby, get over it.

the issue is ambiguous calls favour their home country by a large margin

While I agree with what you are saying the one important ingredient here is that unlike every single view on the matter referees are paid as part of their employment to not be biased. It is a core to their ability to perform their job well. So unless someone can prove emphatically that an honest mistake, something easily done as you say in terms of making the correct decision, rather than either deliberate or subconscious bias is in play for a particular referee, then I agree with SANZAAR in backing their employees. Theories, even very logical, common sense ones, dont hold up on their own as reasons to censure a persons employment. My beef with this is obviously and understably overbiased fans jump on the chea*ting ref scenario far far to easily and quickly as soon as their team is affected. That is the time you need to provide a balance and there is no chance of getting that on a forum such as this when embittered fans are out to get whoever they can for their loss.

Ambiguous is not incorrect.

CANES will exit early with good old Chiefs man Jackson being the Ref.

2 different topics here, and I agree with your point. Ducking a tackle and getting hit high should be your responsibility, Like a no ball in cricket, it is based in your normal standing position. If you must penalise someone,, it is the runner. Flying into a ruck,into a stationary player or elbowing someone in the face is a different kettle of fish.

Just giving evidence, sorry if you don’t like the facts. Yeah the caps and exclamation points add a real sober, reasonable tone (by the way, those are opinions, not facts - they are different things)

Reds fan1 why did TJ Perena have to correct gardner twice in matches against Aus sides/ Total bias by Gardner??? Or a ref making an error.....If it had been a Aus player correcting a NZ ref you would say it was total bias...i say a ref made an error

they also looked at when penalties were given, was it a close game, did that change who got the penalty, they also looked at yc's and rc's. They found when the penalty mattered more in effecting the result it favoured their country more, especially when the call was ambiguous. This implies they did look at the quality of the call to be able to classify it as ambiguous.

Peter, I didn't say they only used penalties to the exclusion of all others, I meant they used the raw number of penalties, rather than reviewing if they were all legitimate. They also used the sole French team in the British comp as a reference point, and reviewed results and winning margins as statistic points. They have made an attempt to control for a teams ability and then reviewed the result against the expected results. For my mind, there is just too much noise in this analysis. It relies on an assumption that a result should be a certain way, and then attribute the divergence from that expectation on the refs nationality. There is too much to try and control for within an analysis like this. This is not to say there is not a bias, I have already mentioned earlier that we all have a bias. I have an issue with the assumptions and the subsequent analysis in this study is all.

Just giving evidence, sorry if you don't like the facts.

The problem with subconscious bias is that it is intrinsic in everything we see, do, feel, say, express, interpret, etc etc. We cannot take a step back to an ivory tower and observe something free from our own bias. So, in that Refs have their own bias, we as individuals, also have our own bias from which we observe that bias and interpret the impact it has on the specific game or event we are watching. It is interesting that there has never been, to my knowledge, a criticism leveled at Angus Gardner controlling an Aussie game, yet surely that has to be, on principal, as bad as a Kiwi ref controlling a Kiwi/non-Kiwi game? While we can expect subconscious bias to occur, it is problematic to show. We can all bring to mind calls that have gone against our team in an anecdotal sense. Reviewing the numbers of decisions or non-decisions in a game and whether they were right or not, controlling for the inevitable noise of genuine human error, might be one way to see if there actually was a bias reflected in the decision making process. However, another confounding factor in any analysis, and one which was referenced in Lionel Page's studies which Peter has linked previously, is getting a definitive decision on an event. From memory a panel of 47 referees were asked to review a series of decisions and not a single event received a unanimous result, as in, there was not one event of those that were viewed which was universally called the same way. This poses a very difficult problem to overcome, and one which I think caused the studies linked to focus on the number of penalties awarded rather than if they were right or not. The beauty of our game is that two people can watch the same game and be actually watching two very different games. As is expressed on these pages day after day.

I see either deliberate or subconscious bias in your comments re refs every week so no im not immune to it. How realistic is it that 99% of your comments reflect decisions against your sides? Is that fair to assume subconscious, selective bias? Even if you fail to present situations that dont suit your narrative you are still communicating a bias. What Im saying is you cant apply a theory to someones performance to the degree that it alters their employment status or ability to perform based on something completely unfounded. You can have an opinion but to expect SANZAR to act on your whim as you have, ijust aint gonna happen.

you have zero understanding of people if you think they don't have subconscious bias. This has been proven by many studies in many areas, it occurs in all decision making which has a subjective component.

Paulo - The studies come to more conclusions than just penalty counts. I am talking about their conclusions based on their analysis. "We found evidence that referees tend to systematically favour their own national teams and this favouritism has a strong impact on the result of matches," Professor Lionel Page said. They controlled for ability. They found that, controlling for teams' ability, teams were much more successful when they were facing a team from another country with a referee from their own nationality. "This is not just about referees making mistakes. We've discovered a systematic biased in favour of home or national teams." Professor Page said not only do referees make more decisions in favour of the team of their own nationality, the favouritism is more likely to happen at critical times of the match when the issuing of yellow and red cards or the awarding of tries when the scorelines are close. He said the research found bias was more likely to happen when a degree of ambiguity was involved and when scorelines were close, particularly towards the end of the match At the same time, the QUT research shows referees are less likely to be biased when matches are televised or relayed enabling strong crowd or audience scrutiny and when the scoreline difference is large, particularly towards the end of the match.

and you can prove instances of subconscience bias or do you have absolutely no proof at all of that amongst the current appointees, meaning to say they are...is in fact, no more than a whim. And you expect SANZAR to act on that whim? Aah...think they need a little more than that somehow. You cant assess someones ability to perform professionally on an unproven and unfounded general assumption as it applies to the person. So it has no grounds as a reason to manage ones performance. These people are paid specifically to perform a role without bias, something no one else in all of professional rugby is. Id back that over a subconscious ‘whim’ any day.

Nice work Paulo