RFU blew their chance to admit mistake in latest debacle – Andy Goode

The RFU has completely missed the point with its latest officiating-related statement and referees simply shouldn’t be in charge of games involved their former teams.

That isn’t because Karl Dickson is going to be biased towards Harlequins or anyone else is going to do anything other than act completely professionally but they just don’t need to be put in that position.

The RFU’s Head of Professional Game Match Officials, Paul Hull, issued a thorough defence of Dickson’s decision not to give Danny Care a second yellow card but there have been just as controversial calls in the not too distant past that he hasn’t spoken out about.

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The only reason it was deemed necessary to do so is that the referee and player are former teammates and Dickson spent eight years at Harlequins as a scrum-half himself, yet that wasn’t even mentioned in the statement.

Most people, whether former players, pundits or fans, agree that it was an offence worthy of a yellow card and both Care and Quins head coach Danny Wilson’s reactions in the immediate aftermath and their post-match interviews tell you all you need to know.

Even if you accept the argument that no ruck was formed, I think the push warranted a yellow card but nobody is asking for every decision like that to be justified with a page-long statement broadcast on TNT Sports and circulated elsewhere.

The optics weren’t good because Dickson, who made 169 appearances for Quins, reached into his pocket initially and then reconsidered and didn’t issue a second yellow card and subsequently a red card to someone he knows really well.

It may have been a completely genuine case of having second thoughts and then coming to what he believes, together with the TMO, to be the correct call but it doesn’t look good to Northampton fans or a lot of neutrals as well.

It was only last weekend in the round ball game that Nottingham Forest were rightly criticised for inferring on social media that VAR decisions may not have gone their way because one of the officials was a Luton supporter.

This case is obviously entirely different and we shouldn’t be questioning the integrity of Karl Dickson or any other official but it is completely fair to suggest that he shouldn’t have been put in that position by his bosses and that is what the statement should have addressed.

I’m all for greater transparency and accountability when it comes to referees and their decisions but Paul Hull’s statement just comes across as defensive and there’s no need for him to justify the decision, while leaving the elephant in the room.

There aren’t too many other cases like this in England, Christophe Ridley came through the youth ranks at Leicester but that’s different and there aren’t many others with close links to one particular club.

Glen Jackson would’ve been another back in the day, you’ve got Frank Murphy and others across Europe but there aren’t really any others in the Premiership so there’s no reason at all that Dickson needs to be refereeing a Harlequins game.

It could be an issue for others in future though if we’re keen to encourage more former players to pick up a whistle. I’d be ruled out immediately because I’d never be able to find a game that didn’t have at least one of my old clubs involved.

Ridley, Anthony Woodthorpe, Matthew Carley and Luke Pearce are all top referees who were doing the other games across the league this weekend so any one of those could have been doing the match at Twickenham, with Dickson the man in the middle elsewhere.

This is the third statement released about officiating in the Premiership in a short space of time and it’s just rugby doing what it tends to do time after time in terms of offering a justification and hoping it blows over rather than someone holding their hands up and acknowledging that a change could be made for the better.

There are only a couple more rounds left in the regular season and it’s a pretty safe bet that we won’t see Dickson in charge of a Quins game on either of those two weekends, that would be pretty inflammatory, but it’s an issue that we’ve discussed in the past and we could be talking about again in six months’ time.

Maybe he won’t referee a game involving his former side again but we just won’t hear an acknowledgement of that publicly, I just feel a chance has been missed for the RFU to come out and say we put him in a difficult spot and we aren’t going to do that again in future.

You get more in this world by being honest and this was a prime opportunity to put your hands up and admit that a mistake was made, a lesson has been learned and procedures have been changed.

Then it would have been put to bed with a little bit of credit clawed back. As it is, it may only be optics but it’s another scenario where the sport hasn’t covered itself in glory, the response is less than satisfactory and the issue may well rear its head again next season.