Refereeing can be lonely but I wouldn’t change it
MOST journeys in life don’t go exactly as planned and that was definitely the case with my refereeing career which began, of all places, on the other side of the world in Australia.
I was on a gap year working in a school in Perth and they sent me on a coaching course. But when I got there after a long bus journey, the people running it said the course was full. They offered me a refund or a free place on the refereeing course. As I was faced with the prospect of sitting around for ages waiting to get the bus home, I decided to go for it.
From there, I refereed the odd school game and then it was back to England to go to university in Nottingham, where I played on the Wednesday and referred on a Saturday. Injuries meant I had to give up playing the game and that’s when I properly threw my hat into the officiating ring. I enjoyed it and it was a good way of staying involved in the game. As a back row you are never far away from the action and that helps you get a good understanding of the basics of the game.
When I joined the Warwickshire Referees’ Society, I broke the mould a little bit in that I was younger than your average referee. But everyone was so welcoming and Ian Roberts was just an absolute legend, he really was a great mentor and coach and is still a very good friend. Refereeing can be quite lonely, you turn up at a club and you’re on your own but having the support of the society was invaluable to me.
I guess the first big step up came at Northampton. They were my biggest local club and I had very fond memories of going to watch Saints at Franklin’s Gardens with my dad. It was the season after they’d been relegated from the Premiership (2007/08) and I was down as the fourth official for their National One game against Cornish Pirates. The referee got injured after about five minutes so I had to then take over. That was my first big experience in front of a big
crowd. Tom Smith, rest his soul, was playing and I made a couple of decisions against him and I got ‘the look’. I was very nervous but I managed to get through it.
Doing that Saints game really whetted the appetite for me to kick on and a trip to Durban as part of a referee exchange initiative between the RFU and South Africa only fuelled the fire more. At this stage, I was refereeing in the Championship and really enjoying it alongside my full-time job as a teacher at a boarding school, but then I got called by Steve Leyshon (the RFU referees’ manager), to attend a meeting at the Lensbury with Colin High, the head of elite referees at the RFU, and Ed Morrison and Tony Spreadbury.
I thought they were going to challenge me around my availability because I was finding it tough to fit everything in and I’d been turning up late for a few games. But it turned out that they wanted to offer me a job. JP Doyle was taken on at the same time.
I never set out to make refereeing my profession but I wasn’t about to turn down an opportunity to get paid for doing my hobby.
My Test debut (Canada v Georgia) came a year after I started working for the RFU, at the Churchill Cup in Canada. I’d also done a couple of women’s internationals and I was about to go to Argentina in 2010 for the World Rugby U20s but unfortunately I had to pull out injured.
I had to wait until Italy the following year to referee some of the current Test stars as they started out on their own journeys. My first game was a 92-0 win for New Zealand against Wales and then a 30-13 win for Ireland against Scotland. Whilst that was a great game, it was a nice change to be able to referee the southern hemisphere teams because the style of play was so different to what you normally experienced. Being appointed for the semi-final between the Junior All Blacks and Australia was totally unexpected.
The following year, in South Africa, I went one better and I was lucky enough to do the final. Handre Pollard and Steven Kitshoff were in that final, and it was at Newlands, one of the world’s most iconic venues. Unfortunately, I had to issue two red cards in the game, to Paul Willemse of South Africa (now France) and New Zealand’s
Ofa Tuungafasi. Referees invest a lot of emotion in their decisions and are very protective of them but when I look back I think, while they were justified on paper, did the game need me to give two red cards? No, it didn’t. So if I had my time again, I’d have made a different call.
When I was refereeing, the Premiership was the pinnacle and I was fortunate enough to referee 120 games, plus 40 in Europe. I loved being in that environment because I was operating with the best in the business. Some players were very challenging but you have to get over that because they are there to do a job and the pressure is on them. Every week it felt like you were playing in front of big, passionate crowds in matches that often went right down to the wire so you could never switch off otherwise you ended up being the main topic of conversation afterwards. Dealing with stakeholders in business now is easy compared with having 12,000 fans screaming at you or a 20-stone prop eye-balling you.
Sending off Anthony Watson, the England full-back at the time, in a game between Bath and Saracens under the Friday night lights at The Rec was a tough decision, for example, and one, with hindsight, that I didn’t get right. Chris Ashton had run alongside him and that had left Anthony off-balance and, as a result, he took Alex Goode out in the air. If any referee says having that many fans baying for your blood isn’t intimidating or it doesn’t affect them, they’d be lying in my book. It is how you choose to deal with it.
It was a tough evening but I loved it, it is what you are there for. There’s a photo of me looking away from the camera with a big smile on my face. I’d just given a knock on to Bath after the Watson incident and the crowd on the far side of the ground stood up in unison to applaud me in ironic fashion. Pure theatre!
The Wembley games were also standout fixtures. I did Harlequins v Saracens twice and the first one of those was a world record crowd for a club game, which was really cool. I lived in London at the time and actually got the Tube to the ground. It was my first time at Wembley and I remember getting off the Tube and walking up the steps and looking down Wembley Way at the sea of people and going, ‘wow’. The trouble was, I couldn’t get into the stadium for a good 45 minutes because the steward on the gate didn’t have a clue who I was!
When the next wave of really good young referees started to come through – Matt Carley, Luke Pearce, Tom Foley, Craig Maxwell-Keys, and Christophe Ridley – all really good referees in my book, I had another two years left on my contract. But I could see that the end was approaching for me in terms of my career on the pitch. It was then that Ed Morrison approached me. He’d gone over to the Celtic League as elite Referee Manager but was retiring and asked if I was interested in applying for the job. It was a fantastic opportunity and one that I was really excited about.
Throughout my career I was always adamant that I wanted to finish refereeing on my terms and transitioning into the role of the Elite Referee Manager for the PRO14 (as it was called then) seemed a great fit. It was a fantastic role working for a company and a tournament that was incredibly ambitious and forward thinking. Dealing with five different Unions and the cultural differences between the referees was very interesting and my time there, and the skills I learnt whilst refereeing, have stood me in very good stead in my current career working as a management consultant for Atkins. I really enjoy what I do now and I genuinely believe I wouldn’t be in this position if it wasn’t for the skills and experience I gained whilst refereeing at the top level of the game.
I look back on my refereeing career with great fondness and feel that I have been incredibly lucky to have met so many amazing people and experienced so many wonderful things along the journey.
“I have been so incredibly lucky to have met so many amazing people”