PICKING THE PACK to play Scotland. Craig Casey’s nicely timed kick up the hoop to senior players. French bubbles, waffles, and guff. Extremely divergent views on a ‘home’ Lions tour. Central contracts and pressue on both players and coaches regarding ‘guaranteed’ starts. Interpro predictions. A relaxation of the ‘no b*nter rule’ to discuss initiation songs.
Thursday’s was a positively stacked Rugby Weekly pod on the back of an improved if imperfect Irish performance in Rome, and in advance of a crunch clash with the potentially ring-rusty Scots on Sunday week. Bernard Jackman, Murray Kinsella and host Gavan Casey discussed the week’s many aforementioned newslines, and also dug into Wales’ thrilling victory over England in Cardiff which unfortunately saw referee Pascal Gauzere and his team of match officials elevated to protagonistic roles as a result of their awarding two highly controversial Welsh tries.
Those decisions and their accompanying fallout, as well as TMO Romain Poite’s failure to spot a clear Irish score by Iain Henderson against Italy, prompted a discussion between Jackman, Murray and Gavan about the standard of officiating in modern rugby as well as the conspicuous deterioration of relationships between player and match official in recent years.
Notable, too, is that Joe Schmidt’s remit as World Rugby’s director of rugby and high performance was recently extended to include a focus on the improvement of officiating standards, an onus welcomed by the three lads as they revised a fairly calamitous Six Nations weekend for those adjudicators on and off the field.
Broaching the topic of officiating to begin with, Gavan said: “People will probably write to us individually on Twitter and tell us how difficult a job it is, and we’re fully aware of that; I think we’re all on the record as saying as much.
“This isn’t about criticising individual officials — it’s more so a discussion about trends in officiating across the board that, at times, is ruining not only the spectacle of the game but actually changing results at this point.
“It’s a conversation about how referees are being trained and how to better equip them to do their job properly rather than leave it go down the path that it’s on”, he added, “because you do get a collective sense that people are losing patience the more and more these types of refereeing performances are popping up — particularly in massive games like the one in Cardiff.
“So, Bernard, what does Schmidt do to address that situation?”
“Yeah, look, people might expect a ‘rant’ but I’m actually not anti-referees at all!” Jackman replied. “I just see an area of our game that’s getting further away from where it needs to be and, unfortunately, it’s being exposed now at the highest level. And I feel sorry for Pascal Gauzere.
“How I think Joe Schmidt could improve it would be to not treat referees and TMOs as being the exact same.
“There’s massive pressure on the TMO,” Jackman added. “Like, Alex Ruiz, who was the TMO for the Wales-England game, is an international referee but that doesn’t mean he’s going to be the best TMO in the world.
“That would be the one thing I think Joe Schmidt could look at as a way of helping referees. Helping them. Because it’s very difficult.”
Gavan then theorised as to why upon consultation as a group, match officials rarely disagree with each other — and in particular with the referee — even when presented with video evidence which suggests that they should, as was the case in Cardiff last weekend.
“It’s more frequent than it used to be that there’s an element of confirmation bias that sets in, groupthink if you like, where a referee might propose what they’ve seen on the field, the touch judge will agree with it, and the TMO will confirm it,” he said.
“I think one way to potentially change that is to demand that the TMO makes a recommendation first — particularly if they’ve flagged the incident — and then let the referee either agree or disagree with it rather than the other way around. Because it does now usually feel as though the referee is very much ‘the boss’ within that specific scenario, so there’s an unwillingness to question him or her at the moment.
“Definitely,” Murray replied. “The dynamic is in a strange place and I agree with you. The Louis Rees-Zammit [incident v England] is a prime example. I’d love to have been in all of their heads at that time; surely at least one of that match official team is thinking, ‘Not a hope, man — that’s clearly a knock-on,’ as most of us watching did and as everyone who has watched it back — including Gauzere — now agrees.
“It reminds me of that bit in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers where the plane is hurtling towards a mountain and the co-pilot is just too scared, or doesn’t want to disrespect the authority of the pilot, and they end up crashing into the mountain because they don’t say anything.
“You’re right that they don’t want to question that authority [of the referee] and that’s probably something for Joe Schmidt and the referees to work on.
Wales celebrate Josh Adams’ try. Source: Laszlo Geczo/INPHO
“That Josh Adams try warranted a look from the TMO,” Jackman added. “But because Gauzere doubled down with Farrell, I felt Alex Ruiz probably said to himself, ‘I better support him here’ — because it was such a confrontational discussion. And that’s what I’ve been seeing constantly for the last year and a half: the lack of respect for each other’s opinions.”
Gavan then claimed that, following Adams’ try, Gauzere had treated a protesting Farrell with a conspicuous “contempt”, and wondered if a collective reset of the player-official relationship would be required in the near future so that all relevant parties might “speak to each other like adults and not in this type of teacher-student dynamic that has crept into interactions” on the field.