Joking aside, refs need to be tough men of the law
Romain Poite made the headlines with his cracking one-liner, ‘I’m a referee, not a coach’, but the plain fact is that our referees are doing far too much coaching, and not enough refereeing.
You see it in virtually every match: a player edges offside at a ruck, and the ref warns him to go back. The player then retreats, but the damage has been done as his actions earn his side a tiny advantage by virtue of slowing things down. At a maul it’s similar, and you’ll hear the ref warning players to leave and rejoin. If a kick goes up, you’ll hear the ref telling players to wait until they’re put onside – if that isn’t coaching then I don’t know what is!
The argument for refs coaching it is that it’s sympathetic, and if they didn’t do it there would be too many penalties. The counter argument is that professional players ought to know the laws inside out and be capable of applying them. If they then offend, they should be penalised.
It’s a worry that in a number of sports, professionalism seems to equate to ignorance. Football has been sullied for years by players abusing refs, and generally behaving badly, but this could be sorted inside a month if the authorities and referees had the guts to do it. Football has its laws too – its Law 12 says that abusive language or gestures must lead to a player being sent off. Once a couple of games had finished with seven on each side, as a result of referees applying the rules on dissent and abusive behaviour, pukka coaches – as opposed to the ones with a whistle – would have their players licked into shape, and behaviour would improve dramatically. It won’t happen as no-one has the cojones to face up to it.
You see pro golfers calling for the referee because they lack the basic knowledge of the rules of the game – too many hours spent on the range hitting balls, and not enough time understanding the way the game is played.
We now know, after the Hartley/Haskell incident, that even top players have significant gaps in their knowledge of the way the laws work and part of that is down to them being molly-coddled by refs. Maybe fewer sessions in the gym and more time spent learning the laws would benefit them, and if refs were then instructed to cut out the coaching, and focus on refereeing, the game would be better for it.
Gloucester Rugby are rapidly becoming the soap opera of the Premiership. The Mohed Altrad saga is trundling on – Gloucester’s chief executive confidently said he expected it all to be resolved by the end of January, but here we are, six weeks later, with things still up in the air. We know Altrad, the owner of Montpellier, isn’t going to be allowed to take a majority stake in the club, but as to whether he can even invest, your guess is as good as mine.
On the coaching front, Gloucester are as chaotic as ever, with ‘Lord’ Laurie Fisher the latest to leave the club following yet another spineless capitulation against Harlequins. He was always likely to be off at the end of this season, but an emotional post-match tweet was followed by the news that Qantas would be getting another customer – and who can blame him?
One of the most regularly used commentator’s clichés is to refer to Gloucester as ‘a sleeping giant’, but a diagnosis of narcolepsy is probably more accurate, as the team can show decent form, and then inexplicably fall apart – and it’s been going on for years. The club are one of the Premiership’s prof- itable ones, but finances apart, they’re in a mess, and no-one seems to know what to do about it.
It almost seems as though really good players, and Gloucester have had plenty of them over the years, succumb to something in the Kingsholm water that creates fragility under pressure, and a succession of coaches have failed to find the answer.
Now yet another worldwide search is on for a new head coach, and, perhaps surprisingly, we’re told that interest has been significant – do these guys know what they’re taking on? Gloucester coaching appointments should come with a health warning.
Applause or silence? Before Friday’s match at the Principality Stadium there was a minute’s applause in memory of three Cardiff players: it was moving, but would it have been better to have observed a silence?
Again it seems rugby is following football, and I can’t understand why. Football had the occasional problem with some idiot shouting during the silence, so applause solves that issue. However, at all the rugby matches I’ve attended, silences have been beautifully observed. And I find a packed stadium, where you could hear a pin drop, to be more moving than everyone clapping.