Why World Rugby's New "Match Official Abuse" Rule Might Be Backfiring | Lunch Break

Yeah, I've been thinking about this world rugby referee abuse thing that they've now brought in. And Rossi mentioned it last week at the press conference. And I was thinking about what I thought of it and what does it mean. And it doesn't make sense to me. I don't want this to be another world rugby is an idiot kind of rant.

But let's just look at what it means now. Normally, a coach could approach the referee before a game and then request some time together, discuss a couple of things, get clarity on a couple of things and you know Bob's your uncle. Now World Rugby has not changed that you're not allowed to do that anymore. If both coaches don't agree to see the referee before the match that's effectively a veto for the one who doesn't agree and the other team gets no opportunity. That's the first part of it.

The second part of it is if you have a problem after the game and you've got, let's say for arguments like you've got nine, very specific number, but nine instances that you're not sure about or unhappy about or that you wanted to be reviewed etc. You can have your nine, but you can only upload six. And you can't just upload six privately. You must upload six where everybody can see it, understand transparency, and everybody gets to learn from it. But it also gives away a little bit of what you are thinking.

Let's say you ask about the way the breakdown is officiated. You ask the specific question because you might have something in mind, and that now gets given away. But I think the whole process is not working. Now, the other side of it is the World Rugby now cracking down on abuse of rugby officials. What's their name again?

It's got quite a long name. The Match Official Abuse Sanctioned Process. Now that a mouthful if you ever heard one I understand it 100 It makes complete sense to me Since 2023 the World Rugby has actually been monitoring social media channels and they seen that an increase in abuse of the refs or referees online is directly linked to a remark made somewhere by a coach or a player or somebody typically after a match where tempers are a bit, you know, flared up a bit, fade a little bit. And that often leads to fans jumping online and heaping the abuse on the officials' heads. That makes sense to me.

We don't want that. What we don't want is we don't want uncertainty. And to take away the opportunity to talk to the ref before a match makes no sense to me because it increases the uncertainty. You're not sure how Nick Berry, for argument's sake, is going to do the officiating, the breakdown and how Angus Gardner is going to do it. I'm just mentioning that because those are real people.

You want to make sure beforehand that that should be your right to do it. And also what it does, it leads to frustration. And we saw frustration come to a boil with Cassara, the coach of Italy, berating the ref, Luke Ramos, saying that he had an ambysmal game and he was sanctioned for it in terms of this new process. Two-match ban, he afterwards said he was so sorry he regrets saying it immediately, intensely, immensely, and they reduced his penalty to one match. But the point is, this was frustration born from a lot of things.

One of them probably to do with the fact that they couldn't speak to the referee. Rossi himself said, in none of these games so far, was he able to speak to the ref before because the other coaches did not agree to it. You can now simply ignore an email from World Rugby about meeting the referee and the other team just has to do without meeting the referee. To me that increases uncertainty Uncertainty leads to frustration And frustration leads to the kind of outbursts you saw from Quesada and that leads to him being sanctioned Does it really meet the objectives of what World Rugby was planning to do with this new kind of world thing? You know and on top of Fusada's frustration about the referee was the fact that that poor Italian team had to travel halfway around the around the world.

They had to go to Japan, then they had to go to New Zealand and then they had to go to Australia to play against all the... The travel is immense. We saw the same with England, I mentioned it yesterday starting in Johannesburg flying back to England to play Fiji's game because Fiji didn't play any of the games in Fiji they played it in England and then after that game they had to fly down to Argentina so yeah people say but this is even out in November it weren't even out in November I spoke about it earlier this week the southern teams traveling to Europe and the UK will travel locally to play their games so Africa plays Italy they play France and they play Ireland and then they come back to Twickenham to do the finals not the same it's not even remotely the same So what I'm saying is, if you want to protect the referees and the officials, that's one thing. I agree with that 100%. But you should also, you know, treat the cause of the problem.

Why are these guys getting so frustrated that they feel they have to air it? Because they're being clamped down on, shut off, shut down on the one hand. They can't speak to anybody before. And if they speak about it, they give away their plans. So where is the frustration going to come out?

It's inevitably going to come out in a press conference or something where a coach has just lost his job maybe, his team has lost any chance of winning a title, and they can clearly blame the referee for it. That's what you're going to get. So how do you prevent that You prevent the frustration from building How do you do that You open the channels of communication It not that difficult What I suggesting I not exactly sure i tried to do some research how it worked beforehand but it looks like i think the best solution would be each team gets 15 minutes of referee before a match not doesn't have to be together um and if the one team decides to take up on it fine the other one doesn't that's also fine then people are going to say yeah but a guy like russi is famous for pressuring the referees into a certain direction uh yes and no so if russi can do it why can't Steve Borthwick do it? Why can't Eddie Jones do it for that matter? The same argument applies.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. So that doesn't work for me. And it's also not like it's the same referee every week after week after week. So you can gradually influence you more and more and more towards the end of the season. It's not.

Every single week there's a different referee, a different TMO, a different line judge, like judges. That argument for me doesn't fly. I'm not exactly sure that what the thinking behind that is. So I'm just saying I understand the principle of protecting the referees. Very good principle.

We saw the abuse heaped on Wayne Barnes after the World Cup final. We saw the abuse heaped on Ben O'Keefe after the game against France. Even the game after the match against Ireland. So that's understandable. You want to protect them.

You want to protect them and you know that one of the causes is coaches having an outburst. Yes. But then prevent the coaches from having the outburst by making sure that the coaches have no reason to be frustrated and leading to the outburst. Yes, they might still still have an outburst because they just feel they lost and blame anybody and anybody that moves in that case sanction him. But if he's frustrated because of something that could have been cleared up before the match, that's a different story to me.

Anyway, that's my five cents worth for today. I'd like to hear what your comments are on that. Leave us a comment below. And yeah, that's today's lunch break. Talk to you tomorrow.

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