Why is the ref no longer sacrosanct?
Bob Dwyer oversteps the mark – and is only one of many
Bob Dwyer, coach of that last remaining bastion of amateur principles, The Barbarians, said of last Saturday's man-in-the-middle Jonathan Kaplan: "If he is a good referee, then I have never coached a rugby team in my life. He is a joke. Rocky Elsom's sin-binning wasn't even an offence."
Ignoring the fact that Dwyer was speaking largely in formal fallacy and media-induced hyperbole – Kaplan is the world's number one and Dwyer is most certainly a coach, Kaplan is not a joke, he is usually a very serious-looking chap, and Elsom killed the ball stone-dead for his yellow card even if he wasn't trying to – the whole referee-baiting culture currently flourishing in rugby is becoming ever-more malevolent. Dwyer's rant was the nastiest, but Australia coach John Connolly also contributed, calling some of Kaplan's rulings "confusing".
"It's a tough job refereeing but consistency is important," he said, 'diplomatically' according to the media, 'euphemistically' according to anyone else.
Speak to any rugby fan and ask what the spirit of the game is all about, and he/she will most likely introduce a favourable comparison with football within the first five sentences.
"It is about honesty and integrity on the field of combat," they might say. "It is about respect for your opponent and the laws of the game. It is the knowledge that you can share the experience of playing the game – win or lose – with your opposite number, rather than just scoring cheap victories and begrudging defeat, like they do in football."
Modern sport these days seems to be about the accountability of the man in the middle as much as the result. The referee has such an influence on the outcome of a match that he is never left to make his own calls and have those calls utterly respected anymore – as the IRB's charter of the game suggests they should be. Nor is he allowed to run a game with personality, nor is he allowed to interpret rules in his own way to maintain a positive flow.
There is, in fact, no humanity allowed in the middle of the pitch in the professional game. It is a carcinogenic problem festering within professional sport, the most malignant manifestation of which is to be found in football, and the scavenging media circling it. Think about football: and think especially about the way this problem has come so far that even FIFA's President can openly criticise his own referees. Do we in rugby want the same?
In an interesting innovation, Kaplan – yes, the same one who sin-binned Rocky Elsom in Christchurch – held a first in Durban a fortnight ago: an officials' press conference after a Currie Cup match in which the match officials gave their own versions of events during the match as they had seen them. What came across so clearly during it was the instantaneousness of their observations, the split-second nature of the decisions these men had to make, and the common sense and neutrality they have when they make them. Kaplan has for a long time privately advocated such a conference, and it may be that they become more commonplace.
For a referee to be wrong means he must have made a decision contrary to a law of the game. If he makes all decisions correctly according to the laws, he cannot be wrong. He may differ from us the observers in his perception of what happened in front of him, but that is not the same thing as being wrong. Interpretation and personality is the key to successful officiating of a rugby match, and all the top referees have an abundance of both personality and ability to maintain total focus.
Wrong is a very ambivalent word when it comes to referees, yet those who criticise do so using that word with polemic abandon. Coaches are wrong, sometimes they lie deliberately to defend their team – and they have to. Referees don't. As touch judge Trevor Manuels said at that conference about a punching incident: "Why would I flag and give the call if I didn't see it? I was only a metre away looking straight at them."
We observers forget just how little time rugby referees have to make decisions, and how many need to be made, and in how many directions the eyes need to be looking in order to make them. Just think: location of the ball, offside line, release of the ball by the tackled player, is a supporting defender on his feet or not, position of the tackler's body, time of arrival of the supporting forwards, whether they arrived through 'the gate' or from the side – all these things and others need to be weighed up and judged at every single ruck and maul.
For anyone to control that number of things consistently under the scrutiny and pressure of top-level sport is a minor miracle of human concentration. Rather than focus on the 1 per cent of errors in perception they make, why not focus on the 99 per cent they get right? We, and especially those at the highest level, upon whose shoulders the happiness and enjoyment of millions of people rests, should be grateful anybody tries it at all.
By Danny Stephens
