Refs have become too famous to the game's detriment - they should be more respected but less well known

A debate about threats of violence against a rugby referee’s family came at the same time as one of the most powerful administrators in the sport was convicted of corruption.

I am interested in launching a better conversation about how we in rugby should be getting on with each other. The familiar Twitter method of forming clumps in camps across the rhetorical river from each other and hurling projectiles is old and tired.

Not everything, indeed hardly anything, can be easily fulcrumed on one anecdote or recent episodes. You may wish it were true, but even if Rassie Erasmus never posted one more video showing cherry-picked mistakes by refs, there would still be anger and threats against officials.

So, it is no remedy for online threats to ban one top coach who Tweets gifs showing mistakes (only one side, of course) because it would do just about nothing to curb the vitriol.

It’s a cop out to say: “if that other guy from that other place would just stop what he was doing, it’d be fine.” Go to any grassroots club match or school derby and just listen to the in-match commentary and how it tends to flow downhill to “we wuz robbed” and it is not quietly said.

Also, far less complex sports (tennis, football) have just as much a problem, or more than rugby. So, halving the laws we have is noble but won’t get to the core of the issue.

Let’s first find agreements.

For a lot of us, we came to this beautiful brutal ballet of a game, rough gentlemen, because it wasn’t soccer/football. Either our body shape told us that, or our “caste” and schooling did, or perhaps just our sports aesthetic.

The “we aren’t soccer” ethos is still a raison d’être underpinning much of how we see the ominous trajectory of our club versus country struggle, our sense of superiority when we see soccer players besiege World Cup refs on every hard call when we pride ourselves that many players still call a rugby referee “sir” and all our fans can be seated in and amongst each other without incident.

While there are large cultural divides between rugby and soccer, the gap may not be as large as once it was.

Sometimes soccer can teach us.

By that I mean, counterintuition is valuable. Ice hockey allows its enforcers to drop the gloves and duke it out until someone has won. You might think that sounds savage. But it has the effect of keeping yappy players honest.

Perhaps the relative anonymity of soccer’s whistleblowers is one of those counterintuitive goals.

In rugby, there was a time when referees were unknown.

Yes, as we walked drearily to Newlands station past the brewery, we knew the “blerrie ref” stuffed our team, but my point is we usually didn’t know their name. We didn’t know how to contact them. When we woke up in a brandy coke or bota bag rum haze, we had moved on, and we still didn’t know their names. Refs were just the ref.

Referee Mathieu Raynal speaks to Nic White and Bernard Foley of the Wallabies (Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)

Refs were not celebs with channels where they stood by a tractor and pointed out where their fellow refs had done wrong on Mondays; they were not part of national broadcasts as the real time “ref check” brigade.

Can we agree that we now know the names of ten or 15 rugby refs and their “brands?” We can describe them easily.

For many fans, the ref’s name is their first look on the team sheets. There may be more debate on “who’s 1, 2 and 3 in refs” than the third best tighthead discussion.

In other big sports, refs are not as “personally known” except to institutional bettor and bookies.

There are reasons for that.

A rugby ref talks. To us. To players, often by first name. To the TMO. To the sky. Some of them are funny and some of them try to be funny. Some are bilingual. Some, trilingual.

They can retire to a second career of ref-reffing or ref-rating.

There is a lot to ref in rugby. There can be 200 rucks; plenty of warnings and even admonitions.

The ‘voice of rugby’ is more ref than commentator.

Every scrum is now a decision waiting to alter the course of the Test. Every pilfer attempt a lottery.

Refs are part of the lineouts, walking up the aisle as if a bride; they even whisper to kickers now, to advise them on time.

When super ref Jonathan Kaplan joined Brett McKay and I on our podcast, he spoke of the growing role. His view was that a great ref allowed the game to simmer, to heat up, to explode into classics. It was not a cop role or a forensic scientist.

Also, he said a ref should own up to his mistakes, and preferred that happen in public, at a press conference, right after the match. If you cannot explain it well, or you actually start to know you were wrong, you say it, and apologise.

I liked that (he was referring to a practice in the Currie Cup and it did work well) because there is something tremendously insufficient about the way we handle egregious errors now. A private acknowledgement yes, but no true calibration of “was that in fact a poorly reffed match or just a couple of random bad calls” and a rather “we are above you” attitude by the authorities.

Understandably, refs operate more as a guild or union and prefer a less public accounting. Refs have succeeded in elevating their station: they are now more of the story, can have longer and far more lucrative careers, and have a path to celebrity, all of which is harmed by public correction.

Refs make plenty of errors, but any study of it has found very few bias their errors towards a specific team (home team advantage is slight, but real, for understandable crowd psychology reasons) and not all refs are equal to each other. There is a spectrum.

World Rugby refuses to explain and define an acceptable error rate (on material decisions), but it appears to be somewhere between 10 and 20 in match, with sub-10 superlative and 20-plus being an issue, which if repetitive, leads to drops from the panel or less sexy assignments.

Other sports (the NFL for instance, whose umps are anonymous, as are the refs in baseball and basketball) are more ruthless at publishing error rates and moving duds out of the job.

Attacks on refs happen in every sport. Ice hockey players have used their stick. Soccer refs have been killed. Serena Williams told a line ump she would shove a ball down her throat. NBA disciplined a player for “homophobic slur” against a gay ump. To some extent, rugby does look good in comparison. Players very rarely touch a ref, and when they do, the world caves in.

Coaches often question refs, but I am not aware of outright abuse in the sense of calling them crooked or daft or someone to have a swing at.

Press conferences after bitter losses do fall under the “heat of the moment” category. We give a bit of grace, which is why Erasmus’ more calculated video-diatribes, even if couched in overtly sarcastic tones, ignited more distaste than Eddie Jones saying it was “13 versus 16” or that TMOs are failed refs, both of which are more “abusive” per se.

But “online” threats or insults are the topic de jour in rugby.

Specifically, filthy and cowardly threats against the wife and kids of (probably) the best referee in rugby today (and also, after Nigel Owen, maybe the best known).

Is this de rigueur? Can we curb it? How?

Let’s get this straight: the kind of guy who’d threaten a ref’s wife and kids in the manner described is one sick piece of shit and like most rugby ballers I know, I’d like to test his fighting skills on the street outside whatever hole he lives in, live-streamed on The Roar for your entertainment. (If he looked like trouble, I might need a tool or an assist from a retired lock).

But we can’t be naïve.

This sort of troll is also unlikely to be deterred by any rule we promulgate, any exhortation to be kinder, and certainly won’t be filtered out by technology.

Also, fame is like fly paper to trolls.

Refs in rugby are famous.

Google one of the 15 top refs and you will see they are better known and more discussed than 75 percent of players and half the coaches.

If you ref or coach or pod or write, even with the best of intentions, and attain a following of any decent size, you’ll get hate, weird fans, obsessed followers, and yes, threat mongers.

This happens here. It happens with any sport. And rugby refs are the most visible and watched refs in team sports. They are virtually “players.”

The mathematics is rather simple.

If you have 50,000 readers, you’ll have 5 to 10 imbalanced cowards who will have a go at you and your family and literally know no lines of decency, along with 100 to 200 who merely think you are a knob and go out of their way to show you in error.

So, Owens has 431,000 Twitter followers. So, he probably has 100 or so who wish him bodily harm and are willing to take steps. Maybe a few thousand despise him and will lob insults. Now, this is bad, but it is the price of fame which coaches and players know all too well.

The ref in question (since I want refs to be more anonymous, I am refraining from identifying active refs) has about 60,000 followers on an account where he interacts cheekily with other refs, chefs, and pop culture. His family is on his media. He is a lawyer in a good law firm: the point is, he has chosen to live a life – cheerily -that will inevitably have conflict and enemies.

No rule or law will save us. Just as the least corrupt countries have the simplest, shortest ethics laws and the most corrupt have massive and beautiful laws unheeded, rugby cannot legislate culture. Rugby culture will shape its laws.

As a culture, rugby must do three things at once, but not fall in love with one simplistic and unworkable prophylactic (banning our way to a kinder, gentler discourse) thinking trolls need tinder to set a fire.

In my way of thinking, rugby must go back to a more anonymous ref. By that I mean: it’s just too much. Too much talking on the mike, arbitrary warnings and non-warnings, variances in how players are addressed, strange and frustrating TMO soliloquies which remind us of a Shakespeare were he able to find cocaine back in the days of the Bard, too much face time on TV, and an outsized influence on the game.

I prefer to focus on the players, over coaches, commentators and refs.

Respect? Yes, but not worshipful.

A stronger review system which is published (in part, not the whole) every week, benchmarked to month and season; which will have the effect of demystifying the process, revealing the true sliding scale of skill and scrutiny, and rendering much of the current furore obsolete.

Will that take away the trolls? No, but it would do more to reduced the overall reffing cacophony than banning this fellow or that fellow.

Next, rugby (us, not just the officials) must stamp hard on — I mean ruck the hell out of — ref-abusers. That starts in barefoot rugby, Under 10s, youth club, schools, colleges, and lower level senior clubs. We are not a sport which asks instinctively “who did this to us?”

This is why I don’t like the Erasmus Approach. I don’t find his verbiage “abusive” nor do I think he is that wrong on the merits. My issue with his tactic is it is whiny. Take a loss on the chin, sit down and see what you could have done better, and if you cannot figure it out, copy someone who is getting those calls.

Rugby asks: “how can I do better” and “who can I copy?” Looking for alibis to blame is weak. Rugby is a strong game for strong minded folks.

Finally, rugby must fall back in love with respect. Not hashtag respect. I mean actual respect.

We love this game. We love the past. We revere our heroes. We love to remember. The players, not the refs. The game should always begin, go, and end with the players.

Respect the ref, but keep the ref just a ref. De-emphasise his or her role.

A word here about gender, at the risk of stepping in to more minefields. I am struck with how much clearer and less egotistical the refs were in the Women’s Rugby World Cup. It made me think a bit deeper.

I know we are more similar than different as humans, but women may be better suited to big time refereeing than most men. Why?

Peripheral vision, a less toxic self-centeredness, ancient practice in balancing needs and wants, and vast experience in men coming to them with complaints and overtures.

But back to the main point, some say we couldn’t play without a ref and that is why they should be a protected subspecies. Apart from the fact that a ref should be able to handle correction (it is the bloody thing they do 50 times a game to others) I find that line of thinking rather facile.

We cannot play without each other.

Refs are just one part of it. We need each other. Rugby is a huge game: clubs are two hundred, three hundred people. Players, yes. Refs make games better; more official.

But there are also kids, donors, partners, oldsters, babies, groundskeepers, scorekeepers, bartenders, and just that forever fan.

Oh, and opponents.

Rugby, the continual contest sport, is the ultimate opponent-bashing and opponent-loving sport. Only martial arts may come close to the joy you feel, bandages bloody and falling, nose leaking, knees scraped, knuckles throbbing, and knackered, but having a beer like Eben Etzebeth and Allan Alaalatoa in the Sydney sheds this year, an hour after looking like mortal combat had come to the Allianz.

Refs are part of that beautiful story. They are our brothers and sisters.

Not above the player, really. Just with a role to play to, as Kaplan put it, let the game cook.

One thing I tried to do in 2022, more than before (even if I always tried) was just to decide not to talk about refs that much. Have them be unnamed. If they want to be famous, fine, but then they’ll learn the dark side of fame.

Watching a match and choosing to focus more on how the players solve the puzzle, which includes the ref, is more enjoyable. Not using up my rugby energy on perpetual grievance; instead, trying to understand the utter deviousness of Bok chase squads and Irish attack waves, was a far better way to see it.

Let’s have more fun with rugby in 2023. Our shop window is open to world.

Let’s not prejudge games because “X is ref; we cooked” or see why we won or lost so clearly because of a ref.

Address the current issue by talking less of refs. Name and shame abusers, yes, but don’t put much faith in that “path to innocence.” Instead, swamp them with better, more interesting content.

We can laugh whilst we properly sledge everyone who isn’t a ref in the game.

Rugby promises us it reviews refs, so the only path there is towards transparency of some kind.

In the meantime, let’s start forgetting their names again.