Whistler’s authority must be protected
CHRIS HEWETT
THINKING ALLOWED
WE CAN easily imagine New Zealand rugby folk in the afterlife, shaking the English referee Roger Quittenton warmly by the hand while grabbing the Scottish official John Dewar Dallas roughly by the throat.
The Welsh, another oval-ball community with a highly developed sense of sporting injustice, would do it the other way round, rolling out the red carpet for Dallas before frogmarching Quittenton towards the nearest set of stocks.
It was ever thus and it will never change. When it comes to the whistling community, one side’s knight in shining armour is another team’s plague of locusts.
If we hesitate to place Andrea Piardi and Sara Cox in the same bracket as either of their (delete as appropriate) illustrious/infamous forerunners, it is not because their cup final decision-making last weekend failed to send blood pressure levels through the ceiling, but because big-game controversies are now so common, they are factored into the ticket price. In this respect, as in so many others, we inhabit a more fractious union world. Ask Wayne Barnes, or Jaco Peyper. Better still, ask Craig Joubert.
When the good Mr Dallas, dressed to the nines in his high-collared coat and sensible shoes, left his footprints all over the Wales-New Zealand “match of the century” in 1905 by refusing to awarded a late equalising try to the visiting centre Bob Deans, he began the sport’s original “forever argument”.
Seventy-odd years later, in the selfsame corner of Cardiff city centre, Quittenton went some way towards balancing the ledger by granting Graham Mourie’s groundbreaking Grand Slam tourists a distinctly dodgy match-winning penalty that had something – perhaps everythingto do with the thespianism of Andy Haden, whose ham-acting dive from a lineout was clear-as-day obvious to everyone except the one bloke who mattered.
There were ructions on both occasions, but in keeping with the spirit of the amateur era, the condemnation at least had a sheen of politeness about it, a veneer of gentlemanly conduct. We kissed that goodbye when sport sold its soul to Silicon Valley. Had social media been a thing in the ages of Dallas and Quittenton, both men would have been Instagrammed into self-imposed exile if they were lucky and WhatsApped into an early grave if they weren’t.
As the contrasting rumpus-room travails of Piardi and Cox illustrated, hassle-free refereeing is now borderline impossible. Let us begin with the man from Brescia, who took charge of the URC decider in Pretoria between the Bulls, playing in front of their own up there on the highveld, and Glasgow, who were accompanied on their climate-warming flight south by at least two supporters and possibly three.
“If enough rugby influencers chuck enough dirt at an individual official, some of it will stick”
Towards the end of the match, as the visiting underdogs were baring their teeth in defence of a narrow lead, one of the radio commentators, speaking less than objectively in the broadest of Scottish accents, described a Piardi penalty call as “crap”, suggesting for good measure that the Italian had been promoted above and beyond his ability. A short while later, after Glasgow had taken possession of the trophy, the Bulls coach Jake White – a World Cup winner and one of the most respected voices in the sport – told a press conference that Piardi, below, had “let the away team win”, adding that he had previous in this regard and citing examples.
Leaving aside the hoary old joke about the definition of a good referee being one who is bad for both sides, the criticism left a sour taste. Today’s rugby is full of noises off – noises so loud, so widely disseminated and so easily accessible at the click of a mouse, they can wreak serious havoc with a target’s career. If enough rugby influencers chuck enough dirt at an individual official, some of it will stick. This brings us to the highly capable Cox, who, while controlling a hotly-contested Women’s Premiership final between Gloucester-Hartpury and Bristol with considerable assurance, found herself embroiled in yet another Television Match Official incident: a pantomime so rich in slapstick, it deserved a Christmas run at the local Hippodrome.
Having awarded Gloucester-Hartpury a try for what should have been the least contentious of reasons – namely, that she saw the ball grounded on the Bristol line – she was blindsided by Nikki O’Donnell, the eye in the sky, who insisted there was a hand underneath the oval-shaped object and flatly refused to budge even when her supposed superior attempted, in the calmest and most gentle of ways, to pull rank.
In the end, it was O’Donnell who prevailed and made the call, even though Cox continued to express her doubts. This was a worrying moment for those of us who cling to the belief that in rugby, the whistler’s authority is paramount. Otherwise, we’re on a one-way trip to cricket land, where all the decisions that matter being made off-field while the umpires act as clotheshorses for overheating bowlers.
While Cox might not dream of admitting it publicly, she was a very long way from satisfied with the unfolding of events, even though the episode had no great bearing on the outcome of the contest. But hey, who cares? She was only the ref.
