By Keith Jenner
January 6 2004

With the visit of Tony Spreadbury to the Stoop this week, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about referees and what we should expect of them when they officiate a game.

I will start with the performance of Andre Watson in the World Cup final. His refereeing was widely criticised following the match, and I have spotted an error which he made during the match which could have cost England the world cup, and it has nothing to do with the scrum.

If Jonny Wilkinson had missed the drop goal in the dying seconds of the final and Australia had gone on to win then we would have been justified in blaming Watson for our defeat. I'm not talking about the way he penalised England at the scrum (I will come onto that later), but something more basic and a lot less subjective.

When Elton Flatley was preparing to kick the equalising penalty in extra time, he appeared to take a long time about it. I decided to investigate how long, so I got the video of the game out and timed it. The time from when you first saw Flatley with the kicking tee to the point where he actually kicks the ball was 75 seconds. A kicker is only allowed 60 seconds, so it should have been a scrum to England shouldn't it?

Well actually, I'm not so sure. There may have been an excuse as something happened during this time as Watson had to blow his whistle a couple of times and at one point walked towards the England team. I'm not sure what the problem was, but there had been a couple of England staff on the field in the line of the kick, so maybe he was moving them.

So I decided to give Watson the benefit of the doubt. He had allowed Flatley to take longer over his kick as there were things going on which may have distracted him. How much did it delay him though?

To test this out, I rewound the tape to the equalising kick at the end of normal time. There were no such distractions here, so there was no excuse for the kick taking longer than 60 seconds. Once again I timed it from the first time you saw Flatley on the screen with the tee. I can confirm that he did take the kick in less time than the later one. By 10 seconds! After 60 seconds he had not even started his run-up. The kick shouldn't have been allowed and England should have won the cup in normal time.

The next question to consider is should Watson have spotted it, and should he have done anything anyway. It was the world cup final, and some would argue that in such situations should you give some leeway to take account of the increased tension? I don't believe so, the rules are the rules. The 60 second law is one of the easier ones to referee in Rugby as it doesn't usually rely on interpretation (although I have inadvertently given an example earlier when maybe it did). Generally it is a hard and fast law and there should be no reason for complaint if someone falls foul of it.

It is also a law which is very rarely seen being enforced (does anyone remember a scrum ever being given due to it). I don't believe that this is due to bad refereeing, but more to do with the fact that the law is very rarely broken. There have been many times at The Stoop where the kicker seems to take an inordinate amount of time to kick a penalty. The shouts start to go up around the ground of “get on with it”. On a couple of occasions when we have been faced with a very slow kicker I have timed a few of the kicks and they have very rarely taken more than 45 seconds. 60 seconds is a very long time to take a penalty and Flatley only managed it because he kept going back to adjust the ball.

My main criticism of Watson in this instance is that he appears to have just ignored this law. Often you see a referee glance at his watch a couple of times when kicks are being taken, so I assume the kick is being timed. It looks like Watson decided not to bother.

After the match, the criticism which was aimed at Watson was for the way he dealt with the scrum. England had the upper hand but they were penalised many times for infringements in the front row. The decisions did look strange and the England forwards obviously weren't happy with them.

However, at least Watson did appear to have been consistent with his decisions during the game. It was very easy to say when sitting at home with a pint of beer in your hand, but surely England should have just held back slightly in the scrum and avoided giving away the penalties. That is what appears to have happened in extra time, when an old experienced head was introduced to calm things down. There are issues concerning the competition within the scrum, especially the difference in interpretation between the Northern and Southern hemisphere and it is probably a little unfair to lay all the blame on Andre Watson. The final may have been the most prominent example during the World Cup but it wasn't the only one. Keith Wood has been quoted as saying that he felt that Ireland were disadvantaged in the scrum in their game against Australia as well

On the whole, I believe that what we require from the referees can be summarised as follows:

• Keep control of a game, whilst allowing the match to flow (constant whistle blowing doesn't make for a good game)
• Ensure the laws are kept to when it comes to points of fact (i.e. Length of time for a kick)
• Keep talking to the players. This can reduce the number of penalties which are conceded as players are warned when they may be about to commit an offence (stand up Mr Spreadbury)
• Try to avoid making mistakes (it is impossible to totally avoid them)
• Be consistent.

The consistency point is surely the most important. I note that it was brought up by Mike Scott following the Gloucester game. In an ideal world, the interpretation of the laws would be consistent around the world, which would probably have avoided the problems with the scrum at the world cup final. However this appears to be a long way off, as different countries appear to have different agendas about where they would like to see the laws of the game going. But we don't even appear to have consistency in the Premiership.

Again, there are always going to be problems, as much of the laws are subjective and are open to the interpretation of individual referees. Unless we create robots to do the job there will probably always be an element of inconsistency which is unavoidable.

The most important thing in my opinion is that an individual referee is consistent during a game. For example, if he sin-bins a player for a late challenge then he must give the same punishment when an opposing player commits the same offence. I have to say that I believe that most of the Premiership referees are quite consistent with their decisions.

If a referee is consistent with his decisions then at least a team can adapt even if they believe that he is incorrect. For example, there have been times when watching matches where it appears that one team are flirting with the offside law. The shout keeps going up from the crowd, but the referee is being lenient. If that is the case then at least the other team can see how the law is being interpreted and play along with it. It may not be perfect, but at least the teams know where they stand.

One area where consistency is definitely lacking is in timing. It appears that there is a general tendency to play slightly more injury time these days, but it does appear to be rather hit and miss. I was certainly surprised by the lack of injury time last week against Gloucester. An example of lack of consistency which springs to mind are two games against London Irish the season before last. In the first (the cup semi final), Quins were behind as normal time ended and we were expecting plenty of injury time as there had been a very long break during the second half. However, not much time was added. In the second game, Quins were ahead, but the referee played almost ten minutes injury time and we conceded a try at the end.

I'm not for a second suggesting that there was some sort of anti-Quins skulduggery, but there certainly didn't seem to be much consistency on display.

The obvious answer to this problem is obviously to take the responsibility for keeping time away from the referee. One of the great things about the world cup was that you always knew exactly how long was remaining, and could see that the clock was stopped during breaks in play. I hope that we see this in the Premiership sooner rather than later.

One aspect of the supporter/referee relationship that does become quite clear when you investigate the matter is that generally supporters can be quite unfair on the officials. It is a common occurrence that a decision looks wrong when watching from the stands, but when you see a replay on the television it shows that in fact the referee was correct. We should also be slightly more charitable when a mistake is made. Refereeing is a very difficult job and it is too much to ask that everything is spotted. It must be said that in some games (Leicester v Gloucester on Saturday for example) too many mistakes are made to be readily forgiven.

We should also remember that new referees need to be given their chance in the Premiership if we are going to get a new generation of professional referees coming through. In such cases, they are similar to players making their debuts and we shouldn't expect a flawless display. However, I would hope that when referees are given their chance they have had enough experience at a lower level. Quins recent experience with a new referee was against Leeds in the cup, and he looked very much out of his depth. I hope that this was just a case of nerves, rather than someone being thrown in at the deep end.

Finally, there are the touch judges. They are a regular point of discussion on the message boards, as we try to decide what they are there for. It is surely time for touch judges to take more responsibility than they currently do. There do appear to be some who look to be trying to get involved, whilst others don't appear to be very interested.

Overall, I think that the premiership referees do a pretty good job. They have good and bad days, as we all do and overall the standard is not bad, but could be better. In a game where the rules are so open to interpretation, there will always be disagreements and sides will always feel hard done by if a decision goes against them.