You have to be a strange sort to want to be a tighthead prop, playing lock requires a certain animal disposition and scrum-halves seem to me to need a lunatic streak, but the worst job on the pitch, the one no one wants to take on, is to be the referee. Really. Numbers are declining around the world, and the Unions in England, New Zealand and Australia have all launched grassroots recruitment campaigns in the past couple of years to try to lure more people into doing it. It is not a tempting proposition. In this World Cup the referees have had two main jobs, one is to manage the game, the other is to take the blame from the team that lost it.
World Rugby has actually employed a data science and monitoring company to better protect their referees from all the online abuse they receive, although, presumably, the only real way for them to be safe is to stay the hell away from the internet. Ben O’Keeffe and Angus Gardner were both trending online after the semi-finals last weekend. Players and coaches, press and pundits, pick over their decisions, but it’s the public who really pile into them. O’Keeffe was roundly booed before kick-off in the second semi, and there are already wild accusations swirling around Wayne Barnes’s vendetta against South Africa ahead of the final.
It has always been a hard job. And that was before ref-baiting became an international pastime on social media, before coaches thought it was acceptable to record hour-long videos critiquing performances, which somehow appeared online, or to publicly criticise them for “unconscious bias”.
These days, O’Keeffe says, you just have to accept that you’re going to take pelters. Best cross your fingers and hope that you can make it through 80 minutes without being accused of being a racist because you called an offside or getting a death threat because you missed a wonky throw-in. Because it’s not going to change.
Test rugby started with an argument about refereeing. The very first game, between England and Scotland in March 1871, was settled when the Scots won a scrum five metres from the English line and bundled over for Test rugby’s very first try. The England players were utterly convinced that Scotland’s scrummaging was illegal, and immediately started arguing their case with the referee, Hely Hutchinson Almond.
Almond admitted, years afterwards, that he had no real idea whether the scrum was legal or not. Making sense of what went on in the thick of a scrum was an impossible job, but he awarded it anyway on the grounds that the Englishmen kicked up such a fuss. “When an umpire is in doubt, I think he is justified in deciding against the side which makes the most noise,” he said. “They are probably in the wrong.” Scotland made the conversion and won the match by a single point. Here, then, was the first great lesson of Test rugby. Try not to piss off the referee – 150 years later, England are still working on it.
Also, rugby union isn’t like other sports, and never has been. “From the open nature of the Association game, the referee can see and penalise nearly all cases of unfair play,” Almond wrote, “Just as the umpire can do in cricket. From the nature of the rugby game, he cannot do this.”
The laws themselves are utterly byzantine, and, at 163 pages, a hard copy could be used to fend off a marauding Springbok prop. The mechanics of the game they regulate are as complicated and well-concealed as the workings of a Swiss watch. Take the scrum, which is so impenetrable to everyone else that the word has become synonymous with any old chaotic throng.
There are 11 pages of laws on it alone, governing every last minute detail of the timing, binding and positioning of the 16 people involved. Anyone refereeing is trying to watch for a dozen different things that are all going on at once, most of which they cannot even see. Back in Almond’s era the idea was that the referee did this by trusting the players to regulate themselves. Over the years, though, some of the best, the most admired – and successful – players have been the ones who have been most able to bend and push and stretch the laws to their advantage. Almost everyone is trying to get away with something. It’s just that some of them are better at it than the rest.
All the factors, then, mean the refereeing in rugby is by necessity subjective. It is a question of interpretation and varies according to perspective. World Rugby has, thankfully, given up the effort to pretend it’s possible to reach any kind of objective truth about most of what goes on through video analysis, which only led to interminable delays while everyone disagreed about what we were watching replayed on the big screen.
The game depends on the common acceptance that the referee is acting in good faith, even when they make a mistake, and that it is possible for two people to look at one scrum and come up with three different opinions about what went on. Because, as Almond wrote a hundred and some years ago, “there must be a certain amount of bona fides in it, or it soon becomes no game at all”.
