Wave your arms, a rugby ref is passing by
Acolleague of mine, ironically one who plies his trade in football, made a great comment regarding the game in which the oval ball is used.
“Scrums have become an absolute joke,” he said after watching the umpteenth World Cup match during which both sides were on the receiving end of endless offences come scrum time.
“I get the idea the referee is guessing most of the time when the set scrums go haywire and just raises his arm in a random direction,” he continued.
As a neutral rugby fan more used to analysing the seemingly more simplistic football rules, his honest assessment is actually not that far-fetched given the myriad constantly changing laws.
Maybe a tad unrealistic, but not all that absurd. Especially not in these times when a referee isn’t officiating the rules, but rather according to his interpretations of the laws.
And this is the part that is hard to figure out when stretching out in front of the couch. If the defending team’s loosehead prop isn’t binding correctly, then the attacking team’s tighthead is too low ... or too high .. or too fat ... you get the point.
But it seems that set scrums are not the only area where the ref’s arms are randomly stuck out in any given direction. Don’t even get me started on the officiating around rucks and mauls. If a player isn’t penalised for not releasing the ball in a tackle, his opponent gets blown up for not allowing him to release.
Most of the time the lines separating right from wrong are so fine that guessing which side to point an outstretched arm towards is actually not that far-fetched. The ref is armed with enough technical mumbo jumbo that he can explain either way.
Only four years ago much was made over the way referee Bryce Lawrence handled the World Cup quarterfinal between the Wallabies and the Springboks. The infamous Kiwi whistleman is often referred to by South Africans as “the man who blew the Boks out of the World Cup”.
It is true that Aussie poacher David Pocock got away with murder on that fateful day in Wellington. South Africans were outraged and Lawrence ultimately paid the price for his poor performance.
Fast forward four years, and it seems that Pocock’s antics are again an accident waiting to happen. In fact, this time it is even worse because he has a partnerin-crime in Michael Hooper scavenging balls not always that loose.
And although Frenchman Romain Poite’s handling of the match between the Wallabies and England wasn’t anything close to being Lawrence-esqe, Pocock was still given a fair amount of leeway to poach as he pleased as soon as an English player was tackled. In trying to combat this, the tackled England players clearly held on to the ball for half a second longer, only to get penalised themselves for “not releasing”.
Another referee could have easily “interpreted” that Pocock didn’t allow the player to release the ball.
This brings me back to my colleague’s chirp. Instead of trying to understand why a ref comes to a certain conclusion, let’s fl ip up a coin to see which arm he’ll stick out. At least that way his verdict won’t surprise us.