All Blacks-Lions: Officials facing a fair few work-ons ahead of final test

Frenchman Romain Poite will be the man in the middle on Saturday night. Photo / photosport.nz

If there is an unusual amount of pressure in this week's deciding test it is sitting squarely on the shoulders of the match officials.

And if there is any need for the judicial panel to be called into action, they will also have to think about upping their game after they dismissed the Sean O'Brien with no explanation why.

The test in Wellington deserved a better refereeing performance than the one it was given and the wider game of rugby hasn't benefited from the non-communication behind the O'Brien decision.

The gripe isn't that he avoided any sanction - it is the dismissive attitude from the judicial panel that they don't feel they need to clarify their position.

It's rugby being taken back to the dark ages and silence breeds frustration, non healthy feelings of conspiracy and inconsistency.

In what is likely to be one of the biggest tests in 2017, the trio of Romain Poite, Jerome Garces and Jaco Peyper will be expected to work more effectively as a unit than they did in Wellington.

Poite, who takes over from Garces as referee, is likely to have been told by his World Rugby bosses that he needs to have open lines of communication with TMO George Ayoub.

There were times in Wellington when it appeared as if Ayoub was either ignored or dismissed by Garces. The Australian fourth official was unable to make suggestions on how to deal with a couple of transgressions.

It certainly sounded as if Ayoub wanted to make a recommendation about how to punish Mako Vunipola's second collision with Beauden Barrett.

But before Ayoub could say his piece, Garces had shown the Lions prop a yellow card.

Ayoub is also thought to have wanted to make a point about the O'Brien incident - the Lions flanker hit Waisake Naholo with a swinging arm - but Garces wasn't overly interested in exploring it at the time, despite the collision subsequently being deemed by the citing officer to have reached the red card threshold.

How effectively the three on-field officials worked together is also questionable as while the Lions were penalised five times consecutively in the second half for offside, there were at least four more occasions when they could have been pinged.

Neither Peyper nor Poite advised Garces of the offences despite having a clear view and managing the offside line being their respective areas of responsibility.

As a final work-on for the crew of officials, there will have been pressure applied on Poite this week to be prepared to warn both teams that if they incessantly infringe in the same way, they will be yellow carded.

The Lions will know they were fortunate to avoid a collective card in the second half when they kept trying to kill the All Blacks' attacking momentum from offside positions.

And both teams should be wary of pushing their luck with the officials in such a pressured test.

Frenchman Poite doesn't have a great record of dealing well with big games at Eden Park. In 2013 he had charge of the All Blacks Rugby Championship encounter against the Springboks and wrongly yellow carded South African hooker Bismarck du Plessis for a thunderous but entirely legal tackle on Daniel Carter.

He then had to show du Plessis a second yellow for elbowing Liam Messam in the throat. World Rugby said almost immediately after that the first yellow should never have been shown and nullified the sending off and then cast Poite to the refereeing wilderness for the better part of a year.