'Public has lost faith in refs' - Jonathan Kaplan

Jonathan Kaplan has waded into the ongoing discussion about those doing his old job this week, via a column in The Telegraph.

The former South African test referee claims that ‘public mood has shifted from acceptance to frustration, both over the decisions made and the manner in which they have been reached.’

He went on to explain the changes that he’d make to clean up some of the confusion going on at the highest level of the game: handing more powers to the TMO, encouraging former refs to be TMOs and having all refs contracted to World Rugby.

So basically: common sense, right? The biggest problem with refereeing is the bureaucratisation of its processes, which are seemingly designed to leave no one at fault if something goes wrong.

Let’s look at the case study of Marika Koroibete’s non-try at a pretty crucial time in England’s win over the Wallabies.

There’s a couple of different interpretations of what happened, that Chris Robshaw was offside, that Stephen Moore ran an obstruction and then there’s also the fact that you can’t actually see Koroibete ground the ball anyway.

Ref Ben O’Keeffe and TMO Simon McDowell conspired to make the call that it was an obstruction and penalised the Wallabies, effectively costing them any chance of winning the game right there. Contentious, to say the least. The problem was that by deferring to the TMO and having a committee meeting about what happened makes O’Keeffe look weak.

Now that’s a problem, but not as much as the fact that this way of reaching a decision isn’t universal. Nigel Owens simply uses the TMO as a glorified helper to cue up replays so he can make his own mind up, while the whole question of ‘try or no try’ vs ‘give me a reason why I can’t award the try’ makes things ambiguous to start with.

That’s why Kaplan’s final suggestion is the most logical, and it’s strange why it hasn’t actually happened yet. If all test referees were centrally contracted, then there would be less confusion around procedures. For the record, I’m personally in favour of the way Owens does it, by taking sole responsibility of a decision then that at least will reduce the amount of blowback on the system (but it also probably means that the standardised interpretations will reduce this anyway).

But why stop there? As well as contracting them, set them up in teams just like players. Have a squad of three working each test for a season at a time, rotating the role of main and assistant refs. This way they get know each other’s tendencies and work-ons so that when they’re assisting they look out for the right things. Put juniors in with two seniors so they can gradually work their way up by learning off the more experienced guys.

Kaplan’s ideas make sense, and are worth pursuing – however you get the feeling why they haven’t is probably because it’ll cost World Rugby money. However if the showpiece of the game, a test match in front of 82,000 and being watched by millions on TV, is getting remembered for a couple of dodgy calls then it’ll probably end up being money well spent.

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