Whistlers the real men with muscle for the Cup

Referee Nigel Owens. Photo / Getty Images

"The trouble with referees is that they know the rules, but they do not know the game."

So said Bill Shankly, manager of Liverpool FC at a time when that club was English soccer. If he felt that way about referees in a sport governed by few rules, imagine how rugby coaches feel about those officiating "their" sport, where the breakdown alone can be a byzantine world of claim and counter-claim.

It is hard to think of a sport where the referee has such a central role. We're not talking about the malignant forces of bias and cheating, just the normal course of a game of rugby.

The referee, through his decision-making and interpretation, has massive sway in how the game is played. Taking that a step further, when there are two relatively evenly matched teams, they therefore have a big say in who wins and loses.

"There will be a lot of pressure on all of the referees as they are under so much scrutiny from all rugby stakeholders," former test referee Kelvin Deaker said.

"They are unfairly caught in the middle between the IRB as lawmaker and employer trying to uphold principles of the game, versus the rest of the rugby public [players, sponsors, spectators] who expect a free-flowing rugby spectacle for every match."

To illustrate a point, cast your mind back four years to Cardiff and the stink that followed the performance of English referee Wayne Barnes after New Zealand were knocked out of the World Cup by France.

A senior journalist of Anglo-Saxon/pompous extraction opined loudly the next day that the All Blacks lost because someone finally had the gumption to referee them properly.

On the other side of the coin, one of the key planks of Graham Henry's reappointment strategy was to show in gruesome detail how the All Blacks were wronged time and again by Barnes, particularly in the second half when they did not receive one penalty.

One game, one referee, two wildly divergent assessments of the standard of officiating.

We would be naive to think this World Cup will escape a similar flashpoint.

No matter how hard the International Rugby Board strives for uniformity among their whistlers, there will be those who see the focal areas of contestability - the scrum and the breakdown - through different prisms.

Teams unable to adapt to these whims will wither and then whine.

So, as much as we'd like to think this World Cup will be won through the deeds of the likes of McCaw and Carter, Genia and Cooper or Dusautoir and Parra, there's every chance one or two of the 10 referees will be every bit as influential.