The annoying TMO:
Sorry, folks, but we’re just going to have to do that Toy Story ending again. The TMO has ruled it out on the basis of 33 technicalities. There’s just no way Woody and Buzz could have escaped from Syd’s house of horrors. Everyone back to their places. Shoot – Buzz and Woody get maimed by the mutant toys, then mutilated and eaten by Syd’s dog. THE END.
How I hate the TMO. How I hate its soul-crushing propensity to re-write history. How I hate the way it wipes the smile off people’s faces. How I hate the way it turns anguish and horror into benign puzzlement. How I hate how it smugly tries to control us with science. How I hate its dictatorial supremacy. How I hate how it crushes everything that is human.
The TMO would say there is insufficient evidence that Sir Edmund Hillary planted the flag. The TMO would say there is insufficient evidence that Sherpa Tenzing stood alongside the New Zealander on the summit of Everest. The TMO would haul the heroes back to base camp and make them start again.
There are so many reasons why the intervention of the TMO was such a ruinous end to a terrific test match on Sunday. Here’s one you may not have thought of. If Sam Underhill had scored, that didn’t mean England had won. There was every chance the All Blacks would have gone down the other end and scored. Because that’s what they do. How epic a finish would that have been.
Some of you might remember the 1991 World Cup quarterfinal between Ireland and Australia. With seconds to go Ireland’s Gordon Hamilton scored a wonder try in the corner. TMO might have ruled it out these days. But Dublin went mental. Australia gathered, called a move, won possession back following the kickoff and scored at the other end.
These are the moments that make rugby. These are the moments we were denied on Sunday by a petty bit of human interference that was wrong on so many levels.
The TMO is wrong because it is so depressingly selective. It decides, with almost grotesque perversity, that its job is to annul the most exciting moments of a match. Never mind crucial penalty decisions. Never mind the pass that went 20 metres forwards, three phases back.
The TMO also changes the rules. All game long referee Jerome Garces and his officials had set the offside line. They had allowed a bit of leeway. I counted around 30 marginal offsides in the game, none of which were given. England were frequently offside early on, but New Zealand crept up as the game progressed. Brodie Retallick was a repeat offender.
But that is rugby. The officials, not the law-book, set the code for the day. The law-book is just a guide. One of the bedrocks of rugby is that the laws are determined by the referee on the day. And now they don’t.
It was a terrible, terrible mistake by Jerome Garces to get a TMO involved in a decision like this, because for this one play of the game, he was redefining the offside line. Garces was saying: ‘‘We are now going to have a zero tolerance offside line which is determined by slow motion and freeze frame.’’
Damn the TMO for throttling all that passion and excitement and despair.
It’s a nonsense. This is not how sport is played. It is fraught with difficulty, because rugby’s laws are so ‘interpretable’. Key to this whole morass is when the ball is out the back of a ruck. Former international referee Jonathan Kaplan thought that Courtney Lawes was on-side because the ball was out. Kaplan says that