Gatland needs to get over blaming officials
American sports give us lessons on how to accept controversial refereeing decisions
Warren Gatland needs to grow up, but he’s not alone when it comes to the football codes. Some headlines, and Gatland’s comments, indicate that a match official cost Wales victory over England, in their Six Nations rugby clash over the weekend. Yawn, yawn, yawn.
Never mind that the no-try incident so occupying Gatland’s mind, apparently, occurred in the 23rd minute of an 80 minute match and the decision was a tricky one although most luminaries quoted agree that Kiwi TMO Glenn Newman got it wrong.
Gatland saw a “terrible mistake“, one you can bet he wouldn’t have noticed had something similar gone in favour of his team.
I can’t be bothered looking at a bloke trying to plonk a rugby ball on the turf more than a couple of times. Life is too short, and the more you look, the less you might actually see.
But it was a very close call, and it was not conclusive that Gareth Anscombe planted the ball properly. Former world number one referee Jonathan Kaplan thought the benefit of the doubt should have gone to the attacking team — in other words, doubt exited beyond what Gatland suggested.
The hoo-ha makes me pine for the Super Bowl, and American sports in general, because there is so much more maturity Stateside when it comes to accepting decisions made by officials on the field.
Case in point: There were two big Super Bowl calls which went against the beaten New England Patriots in Minnesota. There was analysis around one in particular afterwards, yet no rancour or blame from the central characters.
The Patriots coach Bill Belichick, whose record of success is beyond belief in an era designed to create a level playing field, did what he has done before and pinpointed his own bad coaching for the loss to the Philadelphia Eagles.
Imagine what we would have witnessed had Michael Cheika, the brat who coaches the Australian rugby team, been on the sideline as the Super Bowl swung against his team. Had those decisions stopped an All Black World Cup campaign, we’d still be hearing about them in 10 years time.
We have a lot of good things to learn from American sport, which has retained a healthy interest in the big plays rather than the big refereeing decisions.
All football games, in all codes, are full of decisions open to debate. To pick on one, particularly early in a game, as match defining is absolute nonsense. Each and every decision changes the course of a game, and teams react to that new state of the game accordingly.
Use of video replays was supposed to settle the arguments, but if anything they appear to fuel dissension in codes such as the NRL.
Many sports are striving for something unattainable — perfect decision making — because they will always be steeped in grey areas. The more football tries to get decisions right, the more it actually risks getting it wrong. Watch the same incident 20 times, rapid fire, and the mind starts playing tricks, as it no doubt does with video referees.
This blame game atmosphere reached a horrible zenith during last year’s league World Cup where people took to the streets over a decision which they claimed, incorrectly, went against Tonga.
I would wager any money you like that a huge proportion of those protesters didn’t even know what the particular rule was about. (I even had emails from Tongan supporters admitting as much). Of course, all those conspiracy-spotting fans failed to take into account decisions which had gone Tonga’s way in a previous game.
The 2018 rugby season is barely a few hours old and the referee blamegame has started to crank up in the Brisbane 10s, partly because referee bashing makes for great headlines.
Has insanely detailed video analysis and the expectations it creates actually made for a better football experience? I would argue not.
Technology works in some sport, particularly tennis where an eagle eye can quickly tell whether a ball is in or out even if the challenge system is open to question. In cricket, it is very good in adjudicating on no-balls and run outs, but more dubious elsewhere.
Football though was better off when alleged “mistakes’’ were largely left on the field, forgotten about, allowing a few — think 1966 World Cup final goal — to emerge as part of sporting lore.
The constant scrutiny isn’t only clouding realistic judgement of sport, it’s robbing us of the joy involved when it comes to the epic stuff ups.
The great decision controversies, and nothing beats the long debate around England’s third goal against West Germany at Wembley more than 50 years ago, had an x-factor, a natural life force of their own. Thanks to endless replays and analysis of endless incidents, the great ones don’t exist anymore.
What the current climate proves is that the more you look for mistakes, the more you describe refereeing decisions as match-turning errors, the more you will find.
What we are now left with is a morass of meaningless errors, where the genuinely interesting ones are lost in the crowd.
We have a lot of good things to learn from American sport.