Allan Massie: Barnes should be credited for allowing free-flowing game

WHAT’S the most irritating thing in rugby today? It isn’t, despite the grumblings of many internet posters, the performance of Jonathan Davies in the BBC commentary box. Not for me anyway; in truth I actually enjoy his contributions.

He is sometimes rashly outspoken, sometimes dead wrong, but most of the time he offers a sharper technical analysis than any of his colleagues. Of course there’s a certain Welsh bias, which can be irritating, but one can discount this, and should remember that we Scots are not ourselves invariably free from prejudice. There are others in the BBC rugby team I would more happily consign to oblivion.

It’s not even the BBC’s ridiculous practice of employing a current international player who happens to be out of his country’s side, usually because of injury, to comment on the touchline. They almost never say anything at all interesting. How could they be expected to?

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Nor is it the vagaries of refereeing decisions. Of course every referee misses things and gets other things wrong. Given the number and complexities of the Laws it would be astonishing if this wasn’t the case. It always has been. If we are now more aware of refereeing mistakes, this is partly because television gives us the chance to see incidents several times, from different angles, and in slow motion. Moreover, a referee is not always wrong merely because his interpretation of a law differs from yours.

A case in point is the law relating to advantage. Sometimes one may think the referee over-generous, sometimes the reverse. The former is more usual. There was a time when referees mostly held that a side had lost its advantage if it made a mistake – by knocking the ball on, for instance. This is rare now, though the deplorable practice of a player deliberately letting the ball drop from his hands seems happily to be in abeyance.

It is a fairly new practice which is currently the most irritating. This is the habit of scrum-halves, or of a player in the scrum-half position, standing over a ball which is evidently out of the ruck, or is at most being held by the foot of a player at the back of the ruck, and so delaying the resumption of play, perhaps in the hope of luring an opponent offside. It’s a bore for spectators, and almost always means that a further period of equally static non-play follows. Referees are usually quick – though to my mind often not quick enough – to demand that the ball be used when a maul stops moving. They should surely be told to allow the opposition to attack a ball over which a scrum-half is hovering as if it was an unexploded bomb, or simply to call “ball out”.

A couple more thoughts on refereeing. Wayne Barnes has come in for a deal of criticism for his handling of last Sunday’s match. No doubt he made mistakes, and perhaps his policing of the breakdown was too lax (though no laxer that Craig Joubert’s of it in Dublin the day before, when he allowed Ireland regularly to go to ground in front of the ball), but the Scotland-France match was surely one of the best games of free-flowing exciting rugby seen at Murrayfield in an international for a long time, and this owed much to Barnes’ willingness to be sparing in his use of the whistle. Two of the best Scottish referees of years past, Jim Fleming and Brian Anderson, became less pernickety in the second half of their careers, and so contributed to making matches they were in charge of more open and exciting than they might otherwise have been.

People sometimes go so far as to accuse referees of being biased – always, one should note, against the team they support, never in its favour. This is a calumny – at least in the professional game. To say, as some Scottish internet posters have said, that they knew Scotland would lose when they saw that it was Barnes who was refereeing last week, is ridiculous. The cricket writer, Neville Cardus, once remarked to Don Bradman that it was usually the losing side that complained about the umpiring. Bradman thought about this for a minute and replied, “No, it’s always the losing side that complains.” In rugby, the truth is that a team which is under pressure at any point of a match is always more likely to infringe and give away penalties than the one which is in the ascendant.

If, on Sunday, Dusautoir & Co stretched the law at the breakdown to the limit and sometimes beyond, I don’t recall many Scots complaining when John Jeffrey and Finlay Calder used to do the same. On the contrary, the more they flirted with the offside law and got away with it, the more delighted we were. But of course that’s how it is. The more intensely we are attached to a club or national team, the more unbalanced, even distorted, our judgment is likely to be. It’s not the referee who is biased; it’s you and me, the committed supporters.

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