Quidgybo
Bench
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Before I launch into this let me point out that I fully support the expansion to two referees, I want it to succeed and I believe, if done properly, it will help officiating of the game move to the next level.
But I fear the concept has been doomed to become an embarrassment and that it will ultimately be abandoned as a failure. The section I've quoted above highlights the core problem. With two referees swapping roles with each change of possession we will have the two teams being refereed to different personal standards within the same match. While one referee might be keeping back his defensive line eleven metres, the other might be keeping his line back only nine. While one referee might be inclined to allow players to lie on a little longer in the play the ball while he is in control to try and minimise penalties, the other might be quick to blow a string of penalties trying to keep the play the balls moving.
These small variations in interpretation don't really matter if both teams within any one match are subjected to the same standard but now we'll have a system that explicitly allows a different standard to be applied to each team from one set of six to the next. Has anyone ever heard of such a recipe for absolute farce?!?
Referees are human and we all know that a human will never give 100% consistent performance. Some days they'll be feeling more energetic than others and they'll keep a good ten or even a big ten. Other days they'll have a shorter tolerance for laying on in the play the ball. We know the referees train to try and minimise these variations in their performance but at the end of the day they are still human. The one saving grace we have is that at least in any particular game both teams are controlled by the same human and are both held to whatever standard that referee is able and inclined to deliver on that day.
The big problems with the system proposed is not that there are two referees. There is more than one way to implement two referees. If instead of swapping roles, one ref was responsible for maintaining the defensive lines for the entire match and the other ref for supervising the ruck from the attacking side then immediately you've got some consistency in who is watching what and from where. Let the defensive ref keep the tackle count, judge offside at the play the ball, award points, and decide send offs and sin bins. Let the attacking ref call when a player is "held", judge the speed of the play the ball, and decide if the play the ball hasn't been executed properly. And let both refs call forward passes, strips, knock-ons and obstruction at any time as their respective positions on the field allow them to see these things.
The problem here is that the two officials do not have either distinct responsibilities and/or complete autonomy. At any one time only one ref is totally "in control", able to make any decision including ignoring the opinion of the other ref. If on a play the "pocket" ref sees a forward pass and tells the controlling ref he can be ignored if the controlling ref has a different opinion. Yet the same play on the next possession may be stopped by the ref now in control because his opinion on what does and does not constitute a forward pass is no longer filtered by the other official.
The media will have a field day highlighting these inconsistencies and the wave of bad publicity next year will not only give the game another self inflicted bloody nose but sink what should have been a genuinely progressive step for helping referees keep up with an increasingly professional game.
Leigh
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