Controversy inevitable when you’re a referee
DURING the build-up to my Test debut as a referee – Scotland’s win against Wales in the 1995 Five Nations – everyone was asking me if I was going to referee the game or go to the birth of my daughter, who was due at any point. Fortunately she was born on the Wednesday and the game was on the Saturday so I got to be at both.
I remember standing there at Murrayfield when the anthems were playing and trying hard to not get emotional. It was an amazing experience. Brian Campsall and John Pearson were the touch judges. The three of us had come up through the refereeing ranks in the North together after I’d left Oxford to go back to university in Cheshire.
In the game, Scotland scored a try from nowhere after the ball had been kicked back and forth during a lengthy passage of play without any stoppages. Brian and John were stood behind the goal laughing because all they could hear from me was ‘take your time Gavin (Hastings), take your time’, as I tried to get my breath back before he took the conversion.
You didn’t get given kit in those days. Apart from a purple tracksuit, you had to supply it yourself. On the morning of a match you’d be given the Five Nations badge which was then sewn onto your shirt. If for any reason the game didn’t go ahead, you had to unstitch it and give it back!
Off the back of the Five Nations, I was chosen to referee a match at the ’95 World Cup, a 38-10 win for France against Tonga. I sent the wrong Tongan off but they were very gracious about it afterwards, knowing that if one of their locks didn’t deserve to go off, the other one did! Mind you, there have been games when I have forgotten my cards. I went to a game, down in the Forest (of Dean), it was Lydney against Leicester, and of course, they relished having Leicester at their place. It’s just as well that I didn’t have my cards with me, otherwise we’d have been looking at 12-a-side, I reckon.
I wasn’t unfamiliar with rugby in that part of the world and, normally, I was quite well received, something that not all referees can say. I refereed around 40 games at Gloucester and as chance would have it, they didn’t normally lose so I was never fearful of walking in front of The Shed whereas at Bath, they always seemed to lose when I was ref. So I was welcomed at Gloucester and hated at Bath.
I remember refereeing a game at The Rec when Matt Dawson was playing and the crowd were chanting ‘same old Dawson, always whingeing’ and then they would pick on me, ‘you don’t know what you’re doing’ etc. In those days, it was never intimidating, it was almost like banter. You just got on with it because you were on your own, there weren’t any assistant referees.
Whilst I was lucky enough to referee at a Rugby World Cup, and be touch judge at another, the biggest game I did was in the Bledisloe Cup – New Zealand v Australia in Dunedin in 2001. Australia won and I was on the first plane to Australia! There was a penalty try in that game – not the first high-profile one I ever gave, as Leicester fans might recall!
George Gregan was in many ways the most difficult player to referee but also the most genial player on the field. After the decision had been made, he came up to me and said, ‘great decision, Steve’, which would have been fine except at that time they were experimenting with field ears (ref link) and the whole crowd heard what he said!
Controversy is inevitable when you’re a referee and perhaps the most controversial decision of my club career, other than the penalty try I awarded to Bath in the 1996 Pilkington Cup Final against Leicester – was my decision, as a touch judge, that John O’Neil, the Munster winger, had put a foot in touch in the 2001 Heineken Cup semi-final against Stade Francais. The ref came over to me to ask whether I thought it was a try or not and to me it didn’t look like it, but it was. To this day, there are photos all over Limerick still, and there are bars I daren’t go in for fear of having to buy a whole round of drinks.
France is probably the most intense place to referee at club level because the expectation of the home team is that they won’t lose. Once we started inter-changing referees and moving around in Europe, as an English referee we had no axe to grind as such, and sometimes the away team won.
One time I remember most vividly was in Agen when I gave a penalty to Brive with one minute to go after one of their players was absolutely clothes-lined on halfway. It was pure instinct to give it, but on comes Christophe Lamaison, a prodigious kicker. As soon as he said, ‘Steve, I am going to kick for goal’, my heart sank because it dawned on me that he would probably kick it, which he did, and all hell would break loose, which it did. I had to stay somewhere else, almost incognito. The following week, a referee called Ian Hyde-Lay went to Agen. He was Canadian but as he didn’t want to be mistaken for being English, he wore the biggest Maple Leaf on his shirt that he could find!
We became full-time referees in 1999, straight after that year’s World Cup. Giving up teaching and becoming a full-time referee was a huge decision. I wasn’t a rank-and-file PE teacher, I was in charge of 16 other members of staff in the Sixth Form College so it was a big decision and all the fears that I had upon choosing rugby came to fruition five years later when I finished refereeing and there was no real planning for referees post-retirement.
Getting a teaching position at the same grade I had before was difficult and I found myself stuck in limbo. Also, it is hard to get your head around the fact that, one day you are a legend in your own lunchtime and then suddenly, you are nothing. It is very difficult to replace the adrenaline and the travel aspect. You fall off a cliff and feel abandoned by the system. I went into a downward spiral and ended up in a dark place. I genuinely don’t know where I would be if it hadn’t of been for the support of my wife.
I had hoped to get into some sort of management, support role but nothing happened, although it was fantastic to be part of Clive Woodward’s management group at the 2003 World Cup, advising the team on law interpretation. That meant working closely with Backy (Neil Back, who famously got a six-month ban for pushing Lander over in the Pilkington Cup final), and there was never any animosity between us, whatsoever. In fact, a few years ago I was really ill and Leicester sent my wife a bunch of flowers. That probably epitomises what is good about Leicester as a club and rugby as a whole.
Like in life, you have to balance the highs in sport with the lows and I had some fantastic highs out of rugby and looking back on it, I wouldn’t swap it for the world. I am glad I refereed when I did rather than now. When I started refereeing referees were the sole judge of fact. As soon as they brought in technology, everything changed – the way players and referees could talk to one another and the role of the referee.
The idea that we can have perfection because we can review incidents and a Television Match Official can stop the game, is alien to what refereeing was like when I started. I still believe that if a referee is able to create an environment where he is allowing the players to play a game within the laws, he is doing a good job. Whereas now, unfortunately, people want you to be a technical and 100 per cent right. That is not what sport is, the rub of the green in all sports has always been a factor. A referee never aims to make a mistake but in a dynamic situation it is bound to happen. You just hope that if you do make an error it doesn’t influence the result.
Everything has changed in the game but nothing has changed in the game if you know what I mean. Referees can sit and pore over the laws and talk about they are going to do this and that but at the end of the day, referees are out there to try and apply a very complex set of regulations.
“Biggest game was the 2001 Bledisloe Cup - Wallabies won and I was on first plane to Australia"