THE STANDARD OF officiating in the URC, and its previous guise as the Pro12, has long been a point of debate and frustration for fans.
It was also a source of frustration for the coaches involved that the URC didn’t have a referees manager for the opening months of this season, no central figure who could deal with their feedback and provide clarity around match officials’ decisions.
Thankfully, former Test referee Tappe Henning came on board as the URC’s head of match officials in December. The South African admits he has been swept off his feet by the demands of the gig ever since, with the role also involving selecting the match officials for URC games and overseeing the match review processes in coordination with the referee managers and coaches from each national union, including the IRFU’s Johnny Lacey and Dudley Phillips.
There has been lots for Henning to get through, including a first briefing with the media this afternoon.
“The standard of officiating has always been talked about,” said Henning, who was previously the Scottish Rugby Union’s referee commissioner.
“I will say this, the more experienced your referees are, the more acceptable their decision-making becomes. It doesn’t mean they make less errors, it just becomes more acceptable.
“I was very aware of the criticism and standards. If we look at why that is happening, it is because the technology is now bringing our spectators closer to the game, which is exciting.
“But that puts referees under the microscope. More things are becoming visible, which wasn’t the case when you were in the stand 10 or 12 years ago. We embrace the technology to help us do better.”
As Henning points out, coaches, players, and fans alike have much more footage to pore over when assessing match officials’ decision-making but he also aims to improve the quality of the officiating.
It’s even trickier in the URC these days with four South African teams and the match officials from that country now involved.
“Interpretation and consistency are probably the two things that coaches mention the most,” said Hennings.
“One of our key areas is to get that interpretation aligned and the best way we can address that is to align our game philosophies with the expectations of World Rugby.
“We don’t want different interpretations of certain areas of the game, so we try to get a better consistency in how we referee on the field.”
Like everyone else involved in rugby, referees and their assistant regularly make mistakes.
Players are dropped by their coaches if they string poor performances together and some supporters have called for a similar system when it comes to referees.
However, Henning underlines that being so cut-throat might be counter-intuitive.
“We look at the incident and we discuss it with the group because it’s a team effort,” said Henning when asked how the review process deals with mistakes.
“We do not want to blame one individual for an error.
“We identify where the flaws are and then we offer remedial work. Do we come down hard on the referees? Yes, we have very honest chats. We put up our hands and be accountable for the decision.
“We are not focused on a knee-jerk reaction to hire and fire after every mistake. Halfway through the season, we will have no match officials left.
“If there is no improvement from the individuals, surely we will make the decision that they are not good enough to perform at this level. Surely we will not continue to give them appointments.”
Henning explained that he is in regular contact with URC coaches via WhatsApp to discuss incidents from their games, provide feedback from the match officials’ point of view, and clarify whether some of the officiating calls were indeed wrong.
It has been suggested in many quarters that rugby supporters and media would benefit from such clarifications being made public, but Henning said it is a tricky issue.
“At this stage, it’s confidential between myself and the coach on WhatsApp to say we’re looking into something,” said Henning.
“There’s a lot of spectators that would really enjoy it if we could be open with them about that as well. It’s probably something I will look into and explore how we could do it.
“At the moment, it is dangerous to put things out in the public domain because that goes onto social media and comments that go with it, whether accurate or not, cannot be controlled. It can develop a perception about a certain decision and the social media disagreement with that puts it out there as covering up. Nobody can control that.
“With the coaches and what goes out to them, there’s some confidentiality and respect between ourselves. The coaches sometimes mention it [in the media] and that’s fine but I’d have to explore it more before we start to go public with all those big calls.”
Henning declined to discuss the post-match disciplinary process in rugby, another area that deeply frustrates fans, pointing out that it is independent of the URC.
He outlined that World Rugby has appointed someone to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the current TMO process, while also revealing that the URC is very keen to bring in Hawkeye technology to help with big decisions.
Hawkeye has been used in cricket, tennis, GAA, and indeed rugby before.
“We had a meeting yesterday between Premiership Rugby and URC,” said Henning.
“We’re joining forces and entering into a test phase with Hawkeye to put it in front of our stakeholders and our boards to show them how it works and all the options available – whether we’d have a bunker set-up or whether we would have it individually at each stadium, what is workable.
“We are working very hard to see what the best package would be for our specific competitions. So we’re looking into Hawkeye and we believe it would make an impact on the quality of decision-making of the TMO, it will have an impact on time [taken to make a decision], on ball-tracking for forward passes and stuff like that, similar to what they do in cricket.
“So we’re investigating it to get it into our competition as soon as possible with the best product fit for our competition. Hopefully, by the start of next season we will be in a position to put it in front of our board to make a decision on whether it can be implemented in our competition.”
