Make way for the rugby referee – a ringmaster with an impossible job

I learned early in this reporting game that often it's the impression of competence which counts, and it was a rugby match played long ago that provided the lesson. Never has a more ignorant observer looked at a game, something that didn't matter to a jot to the seemingly authoritative report that appeared within these very pages the following day. If you didn't know, you wouldn't know, and I knew nothing.

Dr Hickey Park it was: Greystones versus some other bunch. It might as well have been Guam. Yours truly could have been Magellan watching a Chamorro ritual, and that was just what was going on in the stand.

The actual game itself was impenetrable, mainly because rugby rules are designed to be impenetrable. It’s like cricket, any amount of paragraph sub-clauses providing non-playing myopics with jobs totting up various runs, balls, no-balls, silly mid-off balls, leg-overs and all the rest. Except in rugby those guys don’t get parked to the side. Instead they become referees.

Even in Dr Hickey Park, fadó, fadó, the most intriguing figure on the pitch was the ref, a little guy fussily burrowing his way into the middle of everything and blowing his whistle like a miniature Bobby Keyes. He was fascinating, standing on his dignity almost as much as he stood on his toes to lecture hulking great secondrows that could have drop-kicked him into the nearby sea.

And there wouldn't have been a rush to organise a rescue party either because it was clear the guy hadn't a breeze what he was looking at. Neither did the vast majority of the "Come On 'Stones" merchants sitting in the stand, or those on the press-desk ostentatiously standing up to shout out shirt-numbers as three-quarter lines trundled laboriously across the pitch, but we didn't have whistles.

Ruck and scrum
Except it quickly became obvious it didn't matter, since everyone – bar one – was in on the secret: which was that the laws of ruck and scrum were aspirational, a lip-service to cover the reality of the little guy in the middle basically making it up as he went along.

In fact the game’s real fascination was in trying to tease out the decision-making process that made one tiny logarithmical positional infringement wrong and not another; why one collapsed mass of humanity was okay, and another got the whistle. And it was clear there wasn’t any.

With limbs flailing everywhere, any rigid technical definitions were basically reduced to the snap interpretative calls of a little man with a big whistle.

The stands will be a lot bigger and more expensive when the 2014 Six Nations kicks off and there will be experts galore filling them, spouting jargon about binding, body-shape and blitz-defence, while basically being as much in the dark as anyone ever has been at a rugby match.

What everyone acknowledges though, from chancers to coaches, players to pundits, is that just about the most important person on the pitch will be the referee. Over the next month there are going to be solemn verdicts passed on the selection of officials, either a thumbs up for one team or the other. It will matter in a very real sense: the ref as player.

Remember the brouhaha over the ref in the first Lions Test last summer? No? Then throw the name Craig Joubert around the place in France and then duck at the bitterness of the memory of his performance at the last World Cup final. Or mention Andrew Watson to any of England's 2003 World Cup winners and snuggle into the warmth of their venom.

Of course blaming refs is nothing new but in most sports the identity of the man in the middle is encouraged to be invisible whereas in rugby, almost by definition, they are required to be the most high-profile figure of all, even if they don't want to be.

Individual interpretation
Because in a game overwhelmed by definitions and rules, the greatest one of all remains unwritten, and that is that everything fundamentally comes down to the individual interpretation of the myope in the middle. It doesn't matter if it's in Dr Hickey or Twickenham; so much revolves around the referee and how he sees things, which, when you think about it, is a pretty fundamental flaw within the game. It's rugby's great bluff.

Which was alright when what happened out on the pitch stayed on the pitch. But now everyone’s wired for sound and an undeniable element of performance has entered into the referee repertoire too. Even cursory looks at a few rugby matches recently have meant getting treated to displays of officiousness veering wildly between stern authority and determinedly light-hearted ‘aren’t-I-a-hoot’ jollity: ref as ringmaster, if you like, minus only the top-hat.

And of course they’re only too aware of being wired up. With millions watching every move and listening to every utterance, how can they not be? And they also know in their water they have an impossible job, everyone does, something that at some stage of the Six Nations won’t prevent an almighty ruck over consistency of rule implementation.

And it will all be just hot air because despite acres of rulebook, so much will always come down to one man’s hunch. The modern twist comes in terms of plausibility of explanation, a requirement to get the patter right, something you suspect is right up the street of some refs that relish being the centre of attention.

But even if it’s only a matter of time before rugby’s first rock’n’roll ref, it’s reassuring some things will never change: it’s the impression that counts.