Last week’s superb but controversial Bledisloe Cup match illustrated as well as any that rugby is a sport of rough justice. Most top-level games are a toss-up. The only way to be assured of victory is to utterly dominate your opponent.

When two teams are closely balanced on the day — as the All Blacks and Wallabies were — the name to go down in history as victor will usually be decided by the referee’s whistle. Some games you will be unlucky and others you will thank your lucky stars. The All Blacks won 39-37 and must have been thanking their lucky stars.

This rough justice is not established over a series or a season, but over many years. The game of rugby — like many of its most famous rivalries — has been around for almost 200 years. While it may not satisfy the baying crowds, “we’ll see you next year” (or next week, or — in the case of the World Cup — in four years) is the essence and beating heart of the game.

That is why we teach young players from their earliest days “it is not whether you win or lose but how you play the game”. Rough justice — and sometimes even injustice — is part of the rugged beauty of the sport. It teaches us to deal with life.

All that said, it is desperately unsatisfying, for players and supporters alike, to have the result of a match so often arbitrarily decided by marginal and dubious refereeing decisions. 

This piece suggests a few modest improvements to the rules of the sport, as well as an approach to officiating, both of which should make it easier for referees to do their job and avoid some of the arbitrariness currently plaguing the sport.

Establishing the optimal rules for rugby is hard. Rugby is not tennis, ping pong or even soccer. It is a fast-moving multiphase 30-player full-contact sport. But without minimising the difficulty of the task at hand, the administrators of the sport have to do better if it is to thrive.

Scrum woes

The scrum is the first disaster zone. It cannot be right that every time there is a scrum and a shrill whistle blows (which is almost every scrum) all the players and 90% of the spectators pray that the penalty is going their way (the other 10% are convinced that they are so expert in the rules and dark arts of scrumming that they know which way the penalty is going, but in truth they are just as clueless as the rest of us).

Scrum penalties are almost completely arbitrary. And to the extent they are not, a good scrummager is just as capable of fooling a referee as he or she is of pushing his or her opposing number’s face into the dirt.

Easy improvement number one: as a general rule, all scrum penalties should be a free kick. There is no reason why a slipped bind or a dropped knee should mean an automatic three points to the other team. Exceptions can be made for a clear pattern of repeated violations or dangerous play.

Easy improvement number two: there should be far fewer scrum penalties. Driving the other side back, and crushing their will and manhood along the way, should be sufficient advantage from having the better scrum.

Many times, the ball is won in the scrum and the dominating team is about to play it from a favourable position with the other side’s backline back-pedalling to stay onside.

Then the whistle blows to signify that the referee has decided instead to award three points to one of the teams (typically but not always the one moving forward). Just let the players play the game, for crying out loud.

Some of the changes made to the scrum rules over the years have been prompted by safety concerns, but safety is not actually at issue in most of the scrum penalties awarded.

Has there really been a scourge of injuries coming from the set pieces, as opposed to dangerous high-speed encounters like high tackles, shoulder charges, tip tackles and taking a player in the air, which are (usually) swiftly and heavily penalised, as they should be?

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If the statistics show that the scrum is a particularly dangerous phase of play, then perhaps some enforcement is required. But in that case, see “easy improvement number one” above.

As an aside, the same applies to the rolling lineout maul, which has become every team’s favoured offensive weapon, both to score points and to milk yellow cards. Although highly effective, the ubiquity of this technique adds much to the oft-heard critiques of “ugly rugby”.

Are there legions of former rugger buggers hobbling around today because a rolling maul was brought to the ground? If not, we should let rugby take its lead from the feudal sieges of old: when someone takes a battering ram to your castle door, you do what you have to do to stop them.

Imprecision

Easy improvement number three (coming back to the scrum): require the feeding scrumhalf to put the ball in straight. Today scrumhalves routinely pass the ball into the scrum under their own locks’ feet, sometimes to have it get stuck there until the ref decides to award one of the teams three points.

When was the last time we saw a “tighthead” in high-level rugby? I expect it was so long ago that most readers won’t even remember that a “tighthead” is not just a position for the vertically challenged and musculoskeletally gifted, but is also what we used to call it when the team not putting in the ball won the scrum.

That was how the team with the better scrum achieved their advantage in the good old days, not by manipulating to milk a three-point jackpot.

In a lineout, the ball is required to be thrown in straight but this seems to be one place where the match officials tend to be more forgiving, leniency often cynically abused by teams with weaker lineouts.

This is inexplicable given that the assistant referees are perfectly positioned to get this call right every single time. Perhaps one warning can be allowed (hailing from a family of hookers, I have internalised the shame of the skew throw-in) but after that, this rule should be strictly policed.

The breakdown and rucking rules may also be fertile ground for improvement. Any time a tackled player goes to ground, so many rules come into play that there is usually the possibility for penalties either way.

Did the tackler fully release? Was the tacklee actually held on the ground before the release? Did the tackler roll away quickly enough? Did the tacklee hold on to the ball too long? 

Was the third player a tackle assister or allowed to contest possession? Did the clean-out seal off? Did the cleaner bind? Did everyone join through the gate? Was the poacher supporting his own weight?

If the poacher should win a penalty because the tacklee is holding but the ref doesn’t blow it, how long should he wait until he gets pulled over and a penalty is awarded against him?

My brain is hurting, but I have no easy improvements to offer. Someone much smarter than me will need to take this one up. But then again, rugby is a game of grey areas, where both players and spectators have to and do accept imprecision.

The new rules certainly allow the game to flow better than in the old days when the ruck went on until the ball emerged on one side or someone screamed out in agony. As long as the officials are clear and consistent in their interpretation, players can adapt and the game can flow.

Clear and consistent brings us back to the officials themselves.

Common sense

As in other areas of life, prosecutorial discretion must be tempered with common sense and good judgement. There are simply too many rules in rugby — especially around the breakdown — for the officials to attempt to police every single one of them strictly.

Far too often the game is interrupted for marginal infractions which do not affect the game or give the infringing team any meaningful advantage, foot faults over which no one would raise an eyebrow had the referee not blown the whistle.

Good referees allow the game to flow. Less confident officials (or perhaps more attention-seeking ones) keep stopping the match for marginal infringements.

One minimal sensible rule of thumb would be that if 99.9% of people watching a match would not have even noticed an infraction, the referee should not blow his whistle.

To use the example du jour, in the aforementioned Bledisloe Cup match, folks on either side might have legitimately debated the penalty awarded by Mathieu Reynal to Australia in the 78th minute.

Like the penalty after the breakdown of the All Black rolling maul, or the one awarded a few seconds before that to the All Blacks for the Wallabies “sealing off”.

But not a single one of the millions of people watching the match in the stadium or around the world would have criticised him if he had not retracted his penalty because Bernard Foley took 39 seconds for his clearance kick (including several seconds in which “time off” was called).

Instead of being remembered as one of the great rugby matches of all time, this one will be remembered only for this one ridiculous game-changing call.

Then again maybe this call, outrageous as it was, was just karma collecting for Nic White’s Oscar-worthy but likely match-winning theatrical performance a few weeks ago. Rough justice? DM