Shields: I’ve never met a TMO

At a glance

Referees are one thing. Captains can see them, talk to them and try to establish a working relationship.

Only, increasingly, the referee isn’t the sole arbiter. High in the stands a Television Match Official (TMO) sits in judgment too, unknown or unseen to all but the referee and his assistants.

They’re harder for Super Rugby skippers to get their heads around.

‘‘I can’t say I’ve ever met with a TMO before a game,’’ Hurricanes captain Brad Shields said ahead of tonight’s clash with the Chiefs in Hamilton.

Despite the potential for them to have as much impact upon a game as the man in the middle.

‘‘The thing that I’m conscious of is the consistency and some games they have a bit more input than other games. Obviously it depends on the personnel,’’ Shields said.

‘‘But as long as it’s consistent and it works both ways and it’s regular throughout every game, then I don’t have a problem with it. But at the moment it seems a bit inconsistent and you’re not really too sure what’s going to be checked.

‘‘But, as the referees tell us before the game, they’ve got them looking at all the footage and making sure that everything’s happening behind the scenes so, if we’ve seen it, then someone else is bound to have seen it.’’

The aim for every team is to play sufficiently well that a call from on the field, or upstairs, can’t affect the outcome.

For the Hurricanes, giving this year’s Super Rugby title a shake is going to require winning a semifinal and final away from home. So why not start with this final round-robin game, up at FMG Stadium.

After all, it’s no coincidence that the four defeats they’ve suffered this year, in Pretoria, Christchurch, Dunedin and Canberra, all came away from Wellington.

‘‘It was a funny sort of period, because it obviously was when the ABs were coming in and out [from All Blacks camps] and then we had the [June] break and then we had that Brumbies game,’’ Shields said of the successive defeats to the Crusaders, Highlanders and Brumbies.

‘‘From a team perspective, I don’t think we ever lost belief that we still had the team to do it. I think we just went through a little rough patch where we weren’t quite working as hard as we wanted to, we weren’t quite playing the sort of style we wanted to and you can take a bit of a mental hit.

‘‘We got together as leaders and we got together as a group and we talked through solutions. As you saw last week [in beating the Blues] there was definitely a step up in the way we played.

‘‘We just need to keep realising we’ve got a great team and we won’t become a bad team just with a couple of losses. Going down to Dunedin and going down to Christchurch, it is going to be a little bit tougher, we’ve just got to find that edge when we do go away and [work out] how do we win in these places and how do we get good performances when we’re not at home.’’

With the Hurricanes still likely to host the Chiefs in a quarterfinal next week, winning in Hamilton isn’t critical in that sense. But the time has come to show that they’re not soft touches on the road.