United Rugby Championship (URC) referees speeding up their decision times and making more accurate calls, when compared to last season, is a big plus.
But the systems in place sometimes appear to work against the most accurate or fair outcome, which is a problem.
The result is what appears to be lenient punishments for people like Ulster’s Iain Henderson, whose outlawed crocodile roll could end Stormers and Springbok forward Deon Fourie’s career, and no action at all against Ospreys’ Luke Morgan, whose late dive on Sharks wing Ethan Hooker after he scored a try has left the Bok out of action for months.
The URC’s head of match officials, Tappe Henning, was quick to highlight the successes of the new independent TMO introduced this season, and with good reason.
The system allows TMO officials to access camera angles independently, cutting the time taken to make decisions from 1 minute, 40 seconds to 1 minute, 33 seconds in the last six rounds.
Decision accuracy also climbed from 85% to 92% this season.
Henning even admitted the on-field decision not to review and produce a yellow card against Morgan for the dive on Hooker was wrong.
URC takes backlash on chin
But he drew the line at criticising the independent citing commissioner for not escalating the incident for disciplinary action, saying it did not warrant a red card, and also declined to comment on the seemingly lenient three-match ban for Henderson’s injury-causing crocodile roll on Fourie.
The reason he offered was that the citing commissioner and disciplinary process acted independently from the URC match officials, as outlined in World Rugby protocols.
When it was brought up that the public didn’t see these groups as independent from the URC, head of communications Adam Redmond said the URC was prepared to take the backlash on the chin.
The URC would only appeal a decision itself if it met “an incredibly high bar”.
While the independence of the citing commissioner and disciplinary committee is understandable to minimise bias, it can also close off opportunities for review or appeal earlier than ideally in some cases, and errors will inevitably occur.
But that will always be the case as long as humans are officiating.
