Six Nations 2016: Are referees ruining the championship?

Nine matches in and still we await a thriller to match those seen in the southern hemisphere. Chris Hewett outlines the problems facing this famous old tournament

The Josh van der Flier try incident in the England v Italy match (Corbis)

Q | The Six Nations may be an event, but is it really a spectacle? Now that the southern hemisphere season is under way – last weekend’s opening round of Super Rugby produced 53 tries at a rate of almost six a game – there is only one place to find the razzle-dazzle… and it isn’t up here in Europe.

A | Precious few members of the paying public who endured the torments of the Wales-France game in Cardiff will argue with that proposition: most of them had more fun negotiating the 30-mile queue either side of the Severn Bridge and must now be wondering if the £6.50 toll charge was better value than the astronomical price of the match ticket. But as we have seen genuinely great union matches decided on goal-kicks alone – the 1999 World Cup semi-final between the Wallabies and the Springboks, say – the try-count is not the crucial factor. What matters is the mindset. The problem at the Principality Stadium last Friday was an outbreak of rampant agoraphobia affecting both teams.

Q | It wasn’t much better at Twickenham until Conor Murray cracked things open with an opening try for Ireland. Are we in World Cup land all over again?

A | Afraid so. Evidentially speaking, the global gathering last autumn was an open and shut case – and the facts haven’t changed: if the three southern superpowers – New Zealand, Australia and, to a slightly lesser extent, South Africa – are operating under the same laws as their northern cousins, they are playing an entirely different form of the sport. What is more, their can-do approach has rubbed off on Argentina, who are now to be found at the cutting edge of the union code. These were the last four standing at the World Cup and rightly so. The Europeans were, and remain, off the pace, literally as well as figuratively.

Sergio Parisse attempts to stop Matt Scott during the Italy v Scotland game (AFP)

Q | Eddie Jones has been suggesting as much ever since his arrival as England’s first overseas head coach – all that stuff about the players being fit enough for the Six Nations but short of the level required to beat the Wallabies in Australia this summer. But how has this come about? Don’t England have the best sports scientists, the best conditioning staff and more international-class players than they can shake a stick at?

A | All true. But union is played in the mind, not in the gym. We all laughed at Super Rugby in its early manifestations: we dismissed it as a form of sporting candy floss, a kind of “our turn, your turn” form of rugby where tackling was optional and the refereeing of the breakdown was an even bigger joke than the decision not to give the brilliant French hooker Guilhem Guirado the man-of-the-match gong in Cardiff last weekend. We’re laughing on the other side of our faces now, because the boys down south are light years ahead in their thinking.

Q | And even further ahead in their refereeing, it seems...

A | Now you’re on to something. Some of the officiating in this Six Nations has been on the dire side of dreadful, especially when it comes to scrum time. Take Romain Poite, the Frenchman who controlled (in a manner of speaking) the England-Ireland game on the old cabbage patch three days ago. Poite probably understands more about who does what to whom at the set-piece than any of his fellow whistlers – he built his reputation on his expertise in this area – yet he was either unwilling or unable to lay down the law on this occasion. The scrums went on for ever: you could have digested War and Peace during one of them. The book, that is, not the telly version.

Q | Are we saying this doesn’t happen down on the Sydney seafront, or in windy Wellington, or up there in the badlands of Bloemfontein?

A | Not to the same extent, anything like. The southern hemisphere officials on the current Six Nations roster – Jaco Peyper, Glen Jackson and Angus Gardner, not to mention dear old Craig Joubert of World Cup quarter-final cock-up fame – are products of their rugby cultures and routinely produce fast, free-flowing contests rich in attacking intent. But only when they’re back home. The moment they set foot up here, they disappear into a quicksand of set-piece chicanery.

Modern northern hemisphere teams, club and country, are not scrummaging to sap the strength of their opponents like the old-timers of the amateur era – to squeeze their pips until the squeaking reaches dog-whistle pitch and their collective spirit is broken. They are scrummaging purely for penalties and the referees are happy to let them do it. It is rugby at its most cynical and the nonsense will continue until someone with a whistle sends a complete front row to the sin bin. Better still, both front rows.

A scrum goes down in the Italy v Scotland game (AFP)

Q | While we’re on the subject of poor refereeing, can anyone explain how the Ireland flanker Josh van der Flier did not leave Twickenham with a debut try to his name?

A | That was a bad one. Van der Flier said afterwards that he was sure he had grounded the ball, as everyone with a fully functioning pair of eyes knew he had: the timing of his run, the angle of his body and the speed at which he crossed the line rendered any other conclusion ridiculous. But what Basil Fawlty famously called the “bleedin’ obvious” is no longer enough. You need the right television camera shot to provide proof beyond reasonable doubt, and in games of union, those shots can be more elusive than Barry John in his pomp.

There were only two questions available to the dolorous M Poite when he consulted the “eye in the sky”, and he chose the wrong one: “Try, yes or no?” rather than “Is there any reason I cannot award the try?” By handing the whole thing over to the cameraman, who might as well have forgotten to remove the lens cap for all the evidence he produced, he denied Van der Flier his due. “I knew they’d never give it when that question was asked,” said the flanker. Which tells you all you need to know about a flawed process, poorly conducted.

Q | Given that the France-Italy match on the opening weekend turned on a dodgy refereeing decision, what’s to be done?

A | The look on the Azzurri captain Sergio Parisse’s face when he was penalised – probably wrongly – during the last knockings of that contest in Paris said a good deal about the levels of frustration among the active participants. The fact of the matter is that rugby, like cricket, has dug a crater-sized hole for itself by allowing the small screen to make all the big decisions. Or to be strictly accurate, most of them. The call against Parisse could not be referred upstairs because of the protocols, even though a match-winning kick arose directly from it. Lovers of irony must revel in the fact that the camera is the ultimate arbiter… except when the laws say it cannot be used.

Still, we should be grateful for small mercies: the referees have at least provided us with some talking points. As for the rest of the fare, the least said the better. No wonder Jones has taken a vow of silence.