OPINION
Wayne Barnes has published his memoir in which he has taken the opportunity to brand New Zealand rugby fans, and a former All Blacks coach and captain, as Olympic-class whiners.
The now-retired Barnes is right, the evidence is undeniable that Kiwis, given half a chance, love to be bitter about the referee when the All Blacks lose.
They know how to hold a grudge, to overblow the importance of the officials and the decisions they make, and how to throw blame anywhere other than the players and coaching staff.
But for all the heat that has been applied since the Paris final and the release of Barnes’ autobiography, it’s still unlikely that New Zealand would even medal at the whining-about-the-referee Olympics.
Being sour about officiating isn’t a New Zealand problem: it’s a rugby problem and across the globe there are individual referees who have long and harrowing stories to tell.
And these stories are almost always country-specific – as if rugby assigns each major nation their own referee to hate and savage.
New Zealand is Barnes’ bete noire, and while he has abundant reason to feel that Middle Earth is indeed a land of Orcs and Gollums, some of his criticisms need to be challenged to spare a nation angst-ridden months of wrongly believing that every other country implicitly and relentlessly accepts defeat with good grace.
And whether Barnes meant it or not, some of his observations carry that belittling colonial undertone of New Zealand being a sad little nation overly invested in rugby because it’s got nothing else going on.
That he received death threats on social media was unforgivable and if former All Blacks coach Graham Henry did think that match-fixing had occurred in the 2007 quarter-final loss to France which Barness refereed, he really should have kept those thoughts to himself or provided some compelling evidence to support making them.
As for Barnes encountering some idiot at Cathedral Cove in 2011 who gave him a mouthful, that only confirms that, like everywhere else in the world, New Zealand has its share of half-wits who are not reflective of the brainpower or attitudes in the wider populace.
Barnes, in his book, paints himself as the unwitting victim of a Greek tragedy almost, wondering to himself “what is wrong with this country” after that incident in the Coromandel.
But the standard Kiwi, rugby-following moron is no more savage nor abundant than their species equivalent in Ireland, South Africa or France and surely Barnes would concede that it’s a bit rich to condemn New Zealand’s social code of decency and morality as broken when he comes from a country with a long history of fan violence in its primary sporting code.
Mr Idiot of Cathedral Cove reminding Barnes that he hadn’t been forgiven for “f****ng the All Blacks over” four years previously, hardly equates to the sort of retribution he would have faced had he been a football referee in England and wronged the fans of one of the big clubs.
And Barnes’ gripe with former All Blacks captain Richie McCaw is an attempt to rewrite history and create a new narrative that a 28-year-old, inexperienced referee didn’t in fact have a shocker in a game he should never have been given.
Barnes may not like the comments McCaw made in his book about the referee freezing in the second half of the 2007 quarter-final, but that doesn’t mean they are not true.
Barnes will hopefully realise, once the pressure to sell books has eased, that most Kiwis believe he was an outstanding referee who got off to a dodgy start in 2007 and was a victim of World Rugby’s mad views in 2023.
And hopefully, so too, will he come to realise that there were much worse countries than New Zealand to have “f***ed over”.
Look at the way the South Africans reacted to Bryce Lawrence in 2011 when they felt his non-intervention at the breakdown cost them the quarter-final against the Wallabies.
He was told never to step foot in the Republic or there would be people waiting for him.
The poor bloke never really worked again as a referee – forced out, he said, by political pressure as, while he was hated most in South Africa, the Australians weren’t keen on him either as they blamed him for their 2011 World Cup pool loss to Ireland, while the Lions claimed he victimised their prop, Phil Vickery, in the first test of the 2009 series.
Then there was the way Springboks coach Rassie Erasmus antagonised and humiliated Australian referee Nic Berry after the first test against the Lions in 2021.
Erasmus posted an hour-long video on social media pointing out 26 errors Berry made in an attack that left the referee traumatised at having his character and integrity destroyed like that.
French captain Antoine Dupont, adored by his media and the public alike, reacted to his team being knocked out of this World Cup by publicly blaming Kiwi referee Ben O’Keeffe.
“I don’t want to be a bad loser,” Dupont said, in the surest way ever that he was indeed being a bad loser, “and moan about the refereeing but I’m not sure the refereeing was up to the level of what was at stake today.”
Ireland had a little chip at Barnes on their way out of the World Cup – hinting that they felt their prop Andrew Porter was victimised by the Englishman at the scrums in their 28-24 loss to the All Blacks, while the Welsh seemed to blame an enforced change of referee in their quarter-final against Argentina as the source of their defeat.
Their coach, Warren Gatland, said they were doing just fine until Jacco Peyper pulled his calf and was replaced by Karl Dickson after 15 minutes.
And England got in on the act, too, with former captain Lawrence Dallaglio leading the charge to blame O’Keefe for the semifinal defeat to South Africa.
Whining about referees and blaming them for high-profile defeats is a vibrant industry and New Zealand doesn’t have any great claim to be considered among the world’s best at doing it.
And, comparing the vitriolic response to the 2007 loss with the relatively muted and resigned reaction to the 2023 episode, it would even seem that New Zealand is losing its touch in the art of being bitter and needlessly reflective.
Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and has written several books about sport.
The French government and FFR were blamed for failures of hosting the 2023 event.