KEY POINTS:
Last Thursday, amid the lingering postmortems on the Rugby World Cup quarter-final, we carried an expert assessment of the referee's performance. Our assessor, a New Zealand international referee, could not be named because the fraternity frowns on this sort of thing. Now the New Zealand Rugby Union's managing
referee, Keith Lawrence, has emailed all 25 of his colleagues asking our assessor to own up.
"You owe it to your colleagues and the NZ Rugby Union to do the right thing," he says to the unknown perpetrator.
Mr Lawrence's colleagues should advise him to relax. If he or the Rugby Union or whoever has instigated this witch-hunt were to calmly read the article they would notice that it makes a much more balanced assessment of the performance of Wayne Barnes than most television viewers in this country were giving him.
The referee who gave us the benefit of his trained eye did his English counterpart a favour, reminding us Mr Barnes missed many All Black infringements as well, and his different view of the match was a timely reminder of the inevitable subjectivity of the referee's art.
Are rugby referees really so thin-skinned that they cannot survive public criticism from colleagues, coaches, players or administrators? Players such as Tana Umaga reserve their frustrations for their memoirs, and even then they are rebuked for their candour. Participants in the Rugby World Cup are admonished before it starts that referees are not to be criticised.
Or is it the game that fears for its public appeal if the application of its rules is subjected to open scrutiny too often? Every rugby follower can see that referees have an invidious task. The game's rules have become so intricate that at least one of them is likely to be broken in every tackle. If they were rigorously enforced, a match would be reduced to a stilted sequence of set pieces. Referees have to operate on generous dollops of discretion if a match is to provide a spectacle.
The regulating authority, the International Rugby Board, should worry less about criticism of its referees and more about rationalising the rules. Too many matches are turning on penalties for minor and accidental breaches, such as the high arm that allowed England to edge ahead of France in the semifinal. With England in the final the IRB contemplates another World Cup that may be decided on marginal errors.
This is particularly so when the rules allow defensive lines to stand so close to off-side that attacking teams have no room to move. If the IRB is content with rules that favour defence, require the referee's discretion at every tackle and result in crucial rulings that confuse players, crowds and television viewers, then it must accept the consequences.
One of the consequences is that referees' performances will be subject to searching and often severe criticism, not just from their peers, as happens routinely, but from the public and press. Unless fans of the game are allowed this sort of outlet for their frustrations they may cease to be fans of the game.
Mr Lawrence should call off his witch-hunt and ask why his colleagues cannot make open comment on one another's efforts. They already hold reviews among themselves, no doubt learning much from the exercise. Let the public listen too. Many readers have expressed appreciation for our anonymous referee's review of a game the whole country seems to have watched. The man does not deserve a yellow or red card for his trouble, he deserves to be able to identify himself with honour. He has done rugby a public service.