I’d forgotten how well behaved rugby players are

Normally this would be something I would have posted to my Referee’s Corner blog, but since I haven’t used it in years you’re stuck with my own personal experiences here too.

I refereed rugby almost every weekend for 10 years before I got fed up with some of the politics of appointments and left for football (soccer). Although I am now a football referee at the weekends, I continue to referee secondary school rugby on a Wednesday afternoon.

Typically most football players want to argue decisions out on the field, from just a glare in the general direction right up to shouting at the referee. What I have found so far in my career as a football referee is that most of the management techniques I learned in rugby, from a quiet word asking for cooperation up to strangling a game with the whistle, simply don’t have any effect on some players.

The answer to why that is seems to be cultural. In football is seems all referees are assumed to be blind and incompetant until they prove themselves otherwise.

Now in rugby, referees are held in high esteem, partly because without a trained referee teams cannot play contested scrums in New Zealand. And I can back this up with an example from yesterday.

One team was complaining that their opponents were using their hands in the ruck frequently, and they were and I was pinging them whenever I saw it. Now as part of my pre-match briefing I tell captains they can ask me a question at the appropriate time but to make sure what they say is a question, so when I gave a scrum to the team in possession for an unplayable tackle and the captain complains that there were hands in there again, I told her to pipe down.

Her protest, “But they are using their hands,” annoyed me and I decided to take action: A long blast on the whistle and a penalty against her, then I pointed straight at her and said, “You will not tell me how to referee this game!” And guess what? Didn’t her another complaint from her or her teammates for the rest of the game.

That’s not to say there way no communication, she asked me a couple of questions during the game, with regards to a couple of offside and advantage decisions, and I was able to work with her to solve an issue with flankers detaching early from the scrum.

Would I have gotten the same result on the football field? I very much doubt it, in fact I likely would have been swarmed by player and likely booked more than one of them for that behaviour.

As rugby referees we are taught to be the 31st man on the field, but also told there are times you need to be number 1, in football you are the 23rd man on the field and always will be, even when you try to get on top of players. And perhaps that also answer the question of why football struggles for referees despite having more players than rugby, while rugby is able to provide referees to games involving kids as young as 11.

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• Why do top players lack discipline?

The I’d forgotten how well behaved rugby players are by Hamish McBrearty, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.