Richard Loe: Referees spoil Lions series

Referee Romain Poite speaks with All Black captain Kieran Read while confused Lions look on. Photo / Getty

The standard of refereeing spoilt the All Blacks-Lions series.

Both teams played well tonight - and across the other tests - but the whistleblowers must up their games.

All the players and coaches try their hearts out and do their best to deliver the utmost skill. Then we've got a group of plonkers - an Australian, a South African and two Frenchmen - who are meant to be the experts on the rules but don't appear to know them.

Fans from both sides appeared bewildered rather than jubilant or relieved by the draw. It was a flat moment after five weeks of good rugby.

We expect professional players to operate at the highest level, and referees are no different.

An example was the offside of the Lions' reserve hooker Ken Owens towards the end of the final test. A penalty was downgraded to a scrum.

Owens knew he was offside, and his teammates knew he was offside. Not even in the under-11s does a referee change his mind like that.

You can blame Romain Poite to a certain extent, but he's got two officials on the sideline whose titles are "assistant referees". They should be helping more. There's a reason George Ayoub has moved to the TMO box, too. He's no longer on the field or the sideline because he's not up to it.

In short, none of the four refereed to the rules of the game. They don't understand offside or advantage.

From day one of this tour I've mentioned the deliberate slowing down of the game by the Lions. They even employed the tactic when Jerome Kaino was in the sin bin. I don't know how many times the referee told them to hurry up tonight, but then didn't do anything about it.

I accept we have to have neutral referees, but tonight was not a great advertisement.

The Lions have played better as the tour's progressed and congratulations to them. There was some great rugby from both sides but the best referee is the one you can't remember because they let the game flow.

We had a couple of All Blacks - Ngani Laumape and Jordie Barrett - who got their first starts. Both played superbly. In general, everyone who took the field played well, yet here we are talking about the idiots in white.

What a shame.