Another 6 Nations tournament draws to a close on Saturday. In traditional fashion we are throwing a massive party for all our rugby watching friends.
It looks like France are going to win the championship and rightly so. they have played consistently well and been cool headed through out the tournament.
Talking about consistency (or lack of), quite a few people I have spoken to have commented on the consistency of the refereeing this year. I don’t mean the sort of comments hurled at the TV after 5 pints of the good stuff either. Now granted, the losing side will piss and moan a bit about the refs decisions but you must start to wonder when your friends who support the other sides agree that you git a bum deal…
It also seems that the refs coming under fire all seem to be southern hemisphere refs. We all know that the southern hemisphere play a different style of rugby and everything is policed a bit differently but considering they all fall under the IRB then their shouldn’t be any difference. Now I know that there are about a billion Laws the refs need to know and if they were to enforce them all the game wouldn’t move along or be half as exciting, I just feel that there is such a difference in what each ref chooses to enforce that it seems a bit, well, amateurish.
Of course the roots of Rugby Union are set in the armature game but international test rugby is not armature any more. All the clubs have changed the way they work to welcome the professional era. Players get paid a decent wage, sponsors are queuing up and funding is ploughed back into grass routes. So why does none of this seem to happen with match official?
The answer is ‘it does happen’. Refs have training camps too and answer to the IRB. In my humble opinion, the IRB aren’t asking the right questions of the refs. They are to busy making new laws to change how the game works to make it more exciting and pull in more punters. The problem with this is that if they don’t sort out the quality and consistency of the refereeing then the new followers coming through will be confused when a team is penalised heavily (yellow or red card) for an offence in one game yet gets away with it in another with a wrap on the knuckles or isn’t even challenged about it.
Basically, sort the reffing out please. K? Thnx.
