Quarter-final law squabbles

There was enormous upset in New Zealand and the New Zealand diaspora about certain aspects of the refereeing in Saturday’s quarter-final between New Zealand and France which France won 20-18. We shall talk about this.

We have already given two lots of statistics relating to the four quarter-finals and shall go on to discuss matters of other law relating to all four quarter-finals, including the one in Cardiff.

Let us say again, as we have been saying for the past seven years, that this is a law discussion, not a witch hunt and not a finger-pointing exercise.

Let’s go through the points as they occurred, including the instruction to touch judges, the appointment, penalising Richie McCaw, the yellow card for Luke McAlister, the forward pass, the advantage late in the match and the penalty count – all of which seem the main bones of contention.

Before we do we should briefly reflect on foresight and hindsight which affect the first two issues for discussion. Hindsight is much easier than foresight but is no use for what has gone past. Foresight could have put things right before they had a chance to go wrong. If Epimetheus had had foresight, creation would not have been so chaotic and it took Prometheus’s foresight to try to put things right!

1. Fans

We have had lots of mail, mostly from New Zealand. Lots of it has been scurrilous, which does not help in any way. It is not admirable, not sporting and not sensible. Shouting and swearing are not good bases for discussion.

Nor is it possible to change the result.

Wayne Barnes may well devoutly wish to change back the clock and see that Damien Traille’s little pass to Frederic Michalak was forward. Then he would blow his whistle and there would have been no storm of protest.

There would also have been no suggestion that Graham Henry should lose his job.

It may be worth reading Carlo Damasco’s story about the TMO decision which led to the winning score when Fiji played Wales. He was on the point of recommending a five-metre scrum when he saw that it was actually a try. Had he gone with the five-metre scrum Wales may well have won and their coach may well have still had his job. Instead, at the depths of bitter disappointment, Gareth Jenkins was further disappointed by being booted out.

Mind you if his kickers had kicked the way they usually do, he might have kept his job.

So, too, if Luke McAlister or Richie McCaw had tackled Traille New Zealand might well have been in the semi-final and all Barnes’s “inexperience” would have been overlooked.

A lot of what has been written has contained conspiracy theories. Apparently it is not just a South African phenomenon. The conspiracies here suggested that England preferred playing France and so the English officials engineered a French victory and that the IRB needed to keep France in the World Cup for financial reasons.

It was pretty knife-edge engineering!

2. The instruction to touch judges

There were complaints that the IRB had told the touch judges not to get involved in refereeing decisions. The IRB was chided for this because the touch judges had not told the referee that the pass from Damien Traille to Frederic Michalak was forward.

This is a case of hindsight.

Well before the World Cup and open and in public that IRB had addressed the matter of touch-judging, which the IRB’s refereeing manager, Paddy O’Brien, said had been “appalling”. The 16 men appointed to act as touch judges and television match officials – all top referees from around the world – were “instructed to act as touch judges, not as surrogate referees”.

Foresight would have objected to this at the time. Hindsight is too late to put matters right last Saturday.

The Laws of the Game have been published for years and years. They lay down the duties of the touch judge. The touch judge’s job, in law, is to signal the result of a penalty kick at goal or a conversion attempt, to signal touch, whose ball it is and whether the quick throw-in was correctly taken and to signal foul play.

That’s all.

It does not include off-side, knock-ons or forward passes. If people want the law to be different then they must change it. The law is for the game, not the game for the law. It seems that there could be changes to the duties of the touch judge – but after the World Cup, too late to affect the quarter-finals last Saturday. It also seems that there could be changes to the use of the TMO which could include consultation with him in cases such as the pass from Traille to Michalak – again too late for last Saturday.

The instruction to the touch judges to stick to their own lasts, has had a good effect in the World Cup where the touch-judging has been excellent, no doubt because there was an elite group specialising in touch-judging. This may well be the way to go – a group of top men who specialise in being touch judges, rather than having men whose focus is on refereeing and then occasionally acting in the lesser capacity of touch judges.

3. The appointment

After the quarter-final in Cardiff, there were all sorts of people who complained that the referee, Wayne Barnes, was young and inexperienced. But his age and experience were known beforehand and there were no complaints beforehand. He refereed three matches in the World Cup before the quarter-final, and there were no complaints about his age and experience. He was appointed to the quarter-final and there was no audible complaint either.

The appointments are made by a selection committee, consisting of David Pickering, the convener who is Welsh, Kevin Bowring, a former international coach and representing the coaches on the panel that appoints referees, and then ex-Test referees in Tappe Henning of South Africa and Bob Francis of New Zealand, and the experienced assessor Michel Lamoulie of France. Of course, the IRB’s referee manager Paddy O’Brien of New Zealand is a part of the process.

Those experienced men would have been able to evaluate Barnes’s competence.

Barnes is 28, two years older than Steve Walsh was when he first refereed a Test. Barnes, like Walsh, started young. He has been refereeing for 11 years. he has been on England’s panel of national referees for six years, he has been all over the world in various tournaments and had refereed 12 Tests before the quarter-final on Saturday.

When Andre Watson went to the 1999 Rugby World Cup he had refereed ten Tests. He refereed the final.

Barnes had had lots of experience and the old maxim of “good enough, old enough” could apply. Gareth Edwards was 20 when it was decided that he was old enough to captain Wales.

4. Penalising McCaw

The first two penalties in the match, it seemed, were against Richie McCaw. They were the only times he was penalised though being penalised is a hazard because of the sort of close-to-the-wind game he plays,. The same is true of George Smith, Schalk Burger, Serge Betsen and Lewis Moody. They are players often penalised, more because they are not accurate enough in the confused world of the tackle than because of malice.

McCaw, like the other players mentioned, is a star player but even a star player is required to play within law, just as the stronger scrum needs to scrum within law, just as the attacking team at a tackle needs to play within law.

Those penalties happened at roughly five minutes and 8 minutes in the match. The first one was for not rolling away from the tackled player when McCaw was on the French side of the tackle, the second for being “off your feet and playing the ball”. Neither seemed an outlandish decision.

5. Yellow for Luke

France have been attacking down the right and are driving a maul, which New Zealand collapse. The referee plays advantage, noting the collapse of the maul, and France go left. Flyhalf Lionel Beauxis chips.

Centre Yannick Jauzion is on Beauxis’s left. He and McAlister collide.

The All Blacks survive the immediate attack but the referee then calls Richie McCaw, the All Black captain over, and explains that there had been two actions which he labels cynical – the collapsing of the maul and McAlister’s impeding of Jauzion. He sends McAlister to the sin bin and penalises New Zealand, enabling Jean-Baptiste Elissalde to make the score 13-6.

When Beauxis chipped McAlister was pretty well on Beauxis’s line while Mils Muliaina was on Jauzion’s line. McAlister moved off his line to make contact with Jauzion, clearly looking at him before turning away at the impact, which was made with the shoulder. That he went out of his way to make contact would have been important to the referee in making his decision. That McAlister had used the shoulder would have counted against him. That it was the second ‘cynical’ act in the same movement would also have counted heavily. That the action was so close to the New Zealand goal-line would also have counted.

Add those four together and the yellow card seems a reasonable call.

When McAlister returned to the field, the score was 13-all.

There is a clip of this on www.sareferees.co.za

6. That forward pass

At a midfield scrum near their own 10-metre line, France are under pressure but Ima?ol Harinordoquy passes to Damien Traille, the French fullback, on the left of the scrum. It all looks innocuous till suddenly Traille bursts ahead through Luke McAlister and Richie McCaw. It is a sudden acceleration of speed and near the half-way line he slips a short pass of less than a metre to Frederic Michalak on his left. Michalak skips away from Brendon Leonard but the All Blacks are scampering back. Michalak has Vincent Clerc on his left but big Joe Rokocoko is in the vicinity. As speedy Nick Evans closes in and Leon MacDonald awaits, Michalak does the unusual. He stops, swings round, picks out Yannick Jauzion and passes to him and the big centre strides over for the try that proved to be the winning try.

It is the pass from Traille to Michalak that has produced heated protest. The camera angle is a good one for the viewer and to suggest that it was not a forward pass would be madness. It was a forward pass.

If we say that there is not much to discuss. But there is. How does one of the best 12 referees in the world miss what we all can see?

It’s probably about the view. It’s not that the referee does not know what a forward pass is. In this particular match there were 257 passes. There is a raucous quibble about one – 1 out of 257!

First point is the obvious one – that he did not have our vantage point and he did not have the slow motion replay, hindsight’s able assistant.

The speed of Traille’s burst had left the referee slightly behind. The pass was a short one. That meant that the tackle area was clutters – Traille, McAlister McCaw, Michalak.

The touch judge was in line but he had Clerc and Rokocoko down that line and if he was not to play “surrogate referee” perhaps his silence was expected.

It is not good that such a decision should so affect the outcome of the match. It was not the sole contributor to All Black defeat. There were other factors as – like France’s determination, Thierry Dusautoir’s try, a missed conversion, ball lost at the tackle, the pick-‘n-drive tactics over and over as the French veterans stood firm in their trench, the neglect of the outside runners, and so on.

But it has given the New Zealand people something to be angry about and a reason to nurse their love and admiration of their team.Spain

There was a forward pass in the South Africa-Fiji match at a critical time with the score 23-20 to South Africa. The pass has largely been ignored because of a miraculous tackle by JP Pietersen. Had the try been scored and had South Africa lost as a result, there would have been raucous fuss about that, too.

It is just possible that from next year on the TMO could be used in such a case – not for all field-of-play activities, just for movements that result in a try, such as this one, and possibly for identification in cases of foul play. The impetus for the former would now be all the greater after this most publicised forward pass in the history of rugby football.

At present the TMO protocol does not allow the TMO to give advice on actions such as the forward pass or on the action which led to McAlister’s yellow card because they were both in the field of play.

7. Advantage

Let’s just look at what the Law says about what constitutes advantage.

Law 8.1 ADVANTAGE IN PRACTICE

(a) The referee is sole judge of whether or not a team has gained an advantage. The referee has wide discretion when making decisions.

(b) Advantage can be either territorial or tactical.

(c) Territorial advantage means a gain in ground.

(d) Tactical advantage means freedom for the non-offending team to play the ball as they wish.

(d) is the significant one.

With a minute or so to go, the All Blacks attack. They move to the right where Frederic Michalak darts ahead to tackle Luke McAlister. In the tackle Michalak knocks on. The referee calls: “Advantage – knock-on.” He repeats this. It is clearly not a penalty advantage.

The All Blacks recover the ball, McAlister gets back into position. With the score 20-18 to France Brendon Leonard passes back to McAlister near the half-way line. He drops for goal but is not even close.

There is then less than a minute to play.

The first point to make is that the referee had indicated advantage but it was a scrum advantage not a penalty advantage. France had knocked on.

Where Michalak tackled McAlister was about 29 metres from the French line. Where the All Blacks won the ball back was about 36 metres from the French line. That means that there was no question of territorial advantage in this.

But the ball was cleanly available to New Zealand and Leonard passed a long way back to McAlister who was on the half-way line. McAlister had the freedom to play in other ways. His freedom opportunity gave him the choice to drop at goal the way he did.

Presumably the referee decided that that was advantage enough. If he had decided that it was not advantage enough he would have gone back to the scrum.

8. Penalty Count

The penalty count has been much talked about, as France conceded just two penalties in the match, both in the first half, to the eight conceded by the All Blacks.

During the World Cup, these are both sides who have conceded few penalties.

France conceded penalties as follows: vs Argentina 8 (to 9), vs Namibia 4 (to 5), vs Ireland 4 (to 8), vs Georgia 8 (to 13) – average of 6 conceded per match.

New Zealand conceded penalties as follows: vs Italy 3 (to 8), vs Portugal 5 (to 10), vs Scotland 5 (to 8), vs Romania 6 (to 9) – an average of 5 conceded per match.

But then is the penalty count indicative of anything else but that one team infringed x number of times and the other y number of times, for the penalty count does not have to end as a neat draw.

Conceding just two penalties in a match is inordinately low, but then so is conceding just three.