World Rugby chief executive Alan Gilpin admits they are looking at several different avenues in order to get better consistency in the officiating.
That includes Eddie Jones’ suggestion of having a centralised pool of referees, whereby the global governing body are in sole charge of the match officials.
Currently, they officiate in their own leagues before taking charge of Tests during the international windows.
Struggle to get aligned
With the various competitions giving the refs specific areas to focus on and sometimes even operating different law variations, the officials are not necessarily aligned when it comes to the big tournaments.
That can therefore be an issue for the fans, players and coaches, as well as the referees themselves.
“It’s a really interesting idea, it’s certainly one we’ve had some discussion around,” Gilpin said of Jones’ proposal. “The ICC do it for example in cricket where they have their group of elite match officials.
“We’ve got that defined group of elite match officials but the challenge is that they go back into their competitions under the direction of referee managers in other competitions with slightly different remits.
“It’s definitely something we’ve discussed a lot, definitely something we’ll continue to look at. We’ve currently got Mark Robinson doing a match officiating review for us looking at that type of issue, consistency, game philosophy, use of the television match official and how we get that balance right.
“With players’ input, with match officials’ input, with the union input and with the competition input, he’s looking at that and I think we’ll see some strong recommendations.”
World Rugby chief admits Springboks schedule ‘not sustainable’ as global calendar admissions made
The Six Nations thrived despite some of the challenges the officials face by going from their own club competitions to Test rugby.
There were obviously controversies, but it certainly didn’t detract from what was a magnificent spectacle.
Big ‘ask’ for match officials
“You take someone like Angus [Gardner], who had a fantastic [Scotland v France] game. He might be refereeing in Super Rugby Pacific with one set of law trials and then in the Six Nations is refereeing a slightly different set of law applications,” Gilpin said.
“We’ve got to try and tidy that up. There was some good focus on that in our recent Shape of the Game conversations and we’ve got to make it as consistent and simple as possible for the match officials, and then trust them to apply those principles in the way they can.
“That’s what we’re going to see delivered more consistently, that brilliant product we saw in the Six Nations.
“I’ve made this point before; in a rugby match at the top, top level, we’re asking a match official to make about 800 decisions in a game. Some of those are non-decisions, but 800 moments in a game where they are deciding to either make an intervention or not as the game flows.
“It gives you a sense of the ask we’re making on these brilliant match officials.”