Rassie Erasmus has doubled down on his criticism that both coaches need to be present for meetings with a referee before a match.
Ahead of the opening Test match of Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry series against the All Blacks, the Springboks boss said that World Rugby’s insistence that both head coaches need to attend any meeting with officials has forced teams to voice their concerns in the media instead.
Erasmus and his counterpart Dave Rennie both confirmed that they would not be meeting with referee Matthew Carley before the first Test, and the former has stated that he won’t be changing tack ahead of the clash in Cape Town with Georgian referee Nika Amashukeli in charge.
Rassie Erasmus on World Rugby’s referee meeting
He believes that there is little point in discussing anything with the officials with the opposition coach in attendance, as previously, the meetings were used to prepare the referees about certain ploys or tactics.
“In my opinion, it’s impossible to discuss something with the referee with the other coach present,” Erasmus told reporters on Tuesday.
“I’m going to say, ‘Listen, we are concerned about this in the scrums,’ and he’s going to say, ‘But we do this in the scrums’.”
“The meetings were always about what you were going to try and do on the day, so they can be prepped for what your plans are in the game. So you might say, listen, these guys really clean out well at the breakdown; if we get trapped in the breakdown and they hold us down, what can we do to get up? Will you be looking at that, or must we find a way using them to get off the ground?
“But you can’t have that discussion in front of the referee; then the opposition coach knows that’s what you’re looking at.
“So what do you discuss with the referee? Boys, are you going to play within the laws? Are you going to do this? I mean, the laws of the game are the laws, so it’s almost impossible.”
Beers with Dave Rennie
While Erasmus says that a meeting with the officials won’t be taking place this week, he did reveal that he plans to catch up with the All Blacks boss ahead of the second Test match but on a far more casual basis.
“Dave and I had a beer afterwards, and we’re going to try and catch up on Friday for a beer in Cape Town, when we were there before the game, but without the referee,” he said.
“In my opinion, there’s no logic behind two coaches meeting together and discussing the laws with the referees.”
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Coaches are frustrated
Last week, Erasmus said that World Rugby’s decision to force both coaches to be present for the meeting to go ahead has left many frustrated.
“There’s definitely frustration among the coaches that you can’t have meetings with the referee if both teams don’t agree, and it’s now at a stage where you almost accept that both teams’ coaches aren’t always going to agree to a pre-match meeting,” he explained.
“I myself this week said no we don’t need one because it doesn’t help now, after they played four games, and now we wanted to sort out things in three training sessions.
“We had to look at what they put on AMS, and that’s a central system, and then sort of learn from what the answers are from World Rugby, and I don’t think it’s a tactic; it’s an obvious thing: if you want to get something out, you have to get it out here because you can’t really talk to the referee.
“Sometimes there are small things which you’d normally alert referees in meetings and say, ‘Listen, we might do a midfield maul; just be aware of that and know the law’. Now you can’t because you have to have the meeting with the other coach; you can’t say, ‘We might do a front peel in the lineout, maybe don’t stand there when we do the front peel because you might not see if it’s obstruction or not’.”