Referees bowed to
Once upon a time, when Victorian Englishmen roamed the earth in sweat-stained linen jackets, sport was a test of mettle, it was a test of how young men coped with authority, with unfairness, with bad decisions. If you were going to grow a big moustache, you needed a stiff upper lip. Sport was the starch which stiffened that lip.
Those times are gone. Boom! America, with its love of money and technology, blew them up. Boom! Football, with its overpaid superstars and rioting fans, blew them up. Boom! Politicians, with their handfuls of candy pretending life could be fair, blew them up.
These sport-changing explosions have taken me on the trail of Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball and several other great books on the currency of our times, who has just entered a beige building in Secaucus, New Jersey. I have just entered Lewis’ ‘Against the Rules’ podcast.
The beige block, where ‘‘brown is an exciting colour’’, is fed by $15 million a year and a billion metres of fibre optic cable. It is called the Replay Center and is described by Lewis as ‘‘the ultimate man cave.’’ Inside the cave there lives a man called Joe Borgia, bespectacled, blinking in the half light.
Borgia is the man who oversees fairness in the world, at least in the world of basketball. When a referee makes a mistake, or might have made a mistake, or when a billionaire player’s bottom lip starts to tremble, Borgia and his team go into super review mode in the room of 150 screens. The game stops and justice is served.
It all seems to be a crazy amount of time and money to be spent on a sport. But out of all this time and money and research have emerged some curious facts. It was proven that refs’ calls tended to favour whichever team was losing. They also favoured the home team. Predominantly black teams also received more adverse calls under a crew of white refs than a crew of black
refs. There was demonstrable unconscious bias.
These ideas are surely transferable to rugby. I have long believed there is unconscious racial bias amongst the top referees. We see it at every Rugby World Cup. The Pacific Islanders get slammed. The lower-ranked rugby nations do not get equal treatment in the jury room.
We could do with some statisticians drilling down into some of this stuff.
They could also look at the perceived advantage of the home team and the trailing team. This was never better illustrated than in the game this season between the Hurricanes and the Highlanders. The Highlanders deserved to win that game but they did not do so, in part due to the unconscious bias of referee Damon Murphy.
Going into the last 15 minutes he gave almost every significant call to the trailing home team Hurricanes. Murphy started penalising the Highlanders scrum. He allowed Ardie Savea free range to do what he liked at the breakdown. But as soon as Kane Hammington did something similar at the other end of the pitch, the Highlanders did not receive a penalty for not releasing. Instead, Luke Whitelock was pinged for the match deciding penalty.
There are many factors at work here and one of them is mana. Certain players have a sense of entitlement and the refs are influenced by them. Richie McCaw did not have much mana at the 2007 World Cup and the trailing France team received a