Nerdvana is far from providing a paradise
Professional rugby is fast becoming a game of gadgets and gizmos: a bewildering array of cutting-edge thingamajigs, super-advanced thingamabobs and space-age whatchamacallits created by broadcasters in the noble pursuit of transparency and guaranteed fairness. Welcome to Nerdvana, where the geeks rule at the flick of a thousand switches and the rest of us revel in their wondrous appliance of science.
Except the system doesn’t work quite well enough, for nearly long enough, to justify the time and effort spent in developing it. Or the expense, come to that.
Ask Warren Gatland, who has just drawn an excruciatingly painful blank with the Waikato-based Chiefs in a Super Aotearoa tournament that touched stratospheric heights in virtually every department bar the technological one, where subterranean lows were the order of the day.
Weekend after weekend, the Lions coach-in-perpetuity found himself on the rough end of big screen referrals, the outcomes of which were either plain wrong in law – the wiping off of Damian McKenzie’s score against the Highlanders in round six, for instance – or flat-earth wrong on the facts, as in the trouserless farce of Sevu Reece’s crucial try for the Crusaders in round eight after an enormous forward pass.
To his credit, the aggrieved party bit his tongue. We can only imagine how Eddie Jones might have reacted. Or Michael Cheika, or Fabien Galthie, or Steve Diamond, or Dean Ryan. But for all his stoicism, Gatland was uncomfortably aware of the potential cost of flawed officialdom. Narrow defeats are still defeats, and what do defeats mean? Don’t go there.
Things were not great even before some of the games kicked off: the communication gear worn by the referees crashed so frequently, it should have been fitted with an airbag.
Then we had the usual clear-as-mud goal-line debates, where, despite a range of camera angles for which Francis Ford Coppola would happily have given at least two of his limbs, there was no clear view of anything at all.
Despite the technological advances, referees still guess. How many of them have claimed to “have a grounding” when the footage suggests they have nothing of the sort?
And if referees are guessing now, just as their forerunners did back in the day, is there a point to all the techy stuff ? Throw in the odd visually challenged Television Match Official and you have the full list of ingredients for a rare old mess.
Rugby is not alone in discovering that mod cons are not necessarily all they’re cracked up to be. Football, so resistant for so long, is going through a dark night of the soul in its tussle with the vagaries and vicissitudes of VAR: only this week, the round-ball pundits on BT Sport were in a proper lather over a missed penalty in the Europa League quarter-final between Wolves and Seville.
And then there is the sorry case of cricket, where the Hawk-Eye system of ball-tracking looks ever more like the Devil’s work. If Hawk-Eye was reliable, it wouldn’t carry a margin for error. And without the margin for error, there would be none of the “umpire’s call” nonsense, with identical deliveries resulting in different outcomes for different batsmen, depending on the original decision.
Graeme Swann might defend it to the death and with good reason: successful leg-before appeals against opponents halfway down the pitch were not the only factor in turning a very good off-spinner into a recordbreaking one, but they sure as hell helped.
There again, a commentator as wise and fair-minded as the great West Indian fast bowler Michael Holding has his concerns and airs them with increasing frequency, arguing bravely against his own employers.
At least rugby continues to steer clear of the car crash known as the “review” mechanism.
Cricket embarked down this road because television replays had a nasty habit of proving that a batsman had been robbed of his innings by an umpiring error while said batsman was still walking off the pitch, muttering under his breath about the innate tragedy of life.
Such public howlers could not be allowed to stand, the authorities decided.
But howlers will always be with us, like taxes and death and Coronation Street. Why? Because you can’t have a review system without a limit on reviews, unless you really don’t care about getting home at night. And limits are logically incoherent.
An umpiring cock-up is an umpiring cock-up whenever it happens. It isn’t any less of a cock-up because one team has run out of reviews.
Who is to say rugby will continue in its current state of review-less grace? We should not be over-confident: a bright idea in one sport is often embraced by its rivals, even when the idea turns out to be not so bright after all.
There can be no return to the Garden of Eden, where referees called it as they saw it and resulting injustices were seedbeds for great rivalries that flowered for generation after generation.
But rugby still clings to its human element, thanks to officials on and off the field. Some of them are so bad, they’re brilliant.
“Rugby is not alone in discovering mod cons are not all they’re cracked up to be”