Romain Poite's credibility

[ncurd]

The OP does beg a question. And maybe it's not just applicable with Poite, but to all referees. If we look at the list, there are some nations that has had a history with a certain referee, on several, if not all the matches involved where that specific referee was in charge. Maybe WR should look into the matter and not let thos refs officiate games where those specific teams are involved.

SA - Poite
NZ - Barnes
FRA - Joubert

Maybe that is a place to start at least.

That would give nations the ability to dictate what ref's they get based on how they interpret the game. It would very easy to have a problem with everyone that has issue in area's you'd rather they took a more lenient approach.

 

[austingtir]

The OP does beg a question. And maybe it's not just applicable with Poite, but to all referees. If we look at the list, there are some nations that has had a history with a certain referee, on several, if not all the matches involved where that specific referee was in charge. Maybe WR should look into the matter and not let thos refs officiate games where those specific teams are involved.

SA - Poite
NZ - Barnes
FRA - Joubert

Maybe that is a place to start at least.

This got me thinking that perhaps I need to dig through some results and put some numbers on this.

Since Wayne Barnes started his international career in 2006, he has refereed the All Blacks eight times

2007 v France (lost)
2008 v Scotland (won)
2010 v Ireland (won)
2011 v Australia (lost)
2013 v France (won)
2014 v Wales (won)
2014 v South Africa (lost)
2015 v Australia (lost)

That is a 50% win/loss record; 36% below their overall record over that period and the worst record with any referee.
The All Blacks have never won a Tri-Nations or Rugby Championship match that was refereed by Wayne Barnes (0 & 3)

The next is George Clancy, 3 losses from 7 games (57%)

Here are the full stats for all the current referees (not retired and still still on the Elite Referees Panel)

PS: Not implying anything, just putting some facts on the table. People can draw their own conclusions.

I think we need to be making more of a song and dance about this because its plain for all to see when you look at statistics like that and compare it to the normal win loss ratio's something is not right. I think its pretty easy for a reff to hate on one particular team more than the others infact its human nature. Given Barnes previous history with NZ its not the biggest surprise. I actually think it goes to a subliminal level Barnes probably thinks he's reffing perfectly fairly but that doesnt mean he is in reality.

I think this year and last in particular its been incredibly noticeable the overall standard in refereeing has dropped substantially at int and super rugby level.

One thing that irked the hell out of me while I was watching the Aussie game on sat was when the Aussie reserve props came on. Barnes mentioned to them they've been briliant all night and are basically owning NZ scrum and to keep it up (not in those exact words but anyone listening to it knew exactly what he meant). This in particular drove me up the wall as imo it shows bias. He should be reffing the game not keeping score. I dont think we got any scrum calls our way (we were fairly beaten in that area but still the Aussies werent saints all night).

 

[TRF_heineken]

That would give nations the ability to dictate what ref's they get based on how they interpret the game. It would very easy to have a problem with everyone that has issue in area's you'd rather they took a more lenient approach.

No it wouldn't.

I said WR should look at this. And they are the ones who appoint referees for matches. No nation has any control over which referee is selected for which match.

What @austingtir is showing with regards to @smartcooky's post is that certain referees have a history of matches with a specific team. If they were in charge for let's say 4 or 5 matches and all of those matches had controversy or a certain result or whatever, then it should qualify that WR investigate the matter.

Remember, referees are also just human, and with international matches the referees are neutral, but there could be some form of biasness towards a certain nation or player. For all we know Romain Poite's great-grandfather's uncle was a French Hugenot in South Africa in the late 1700's / early 1800's and he was shot by a Voortrekker over a farm dispute or something.

 

[TRF_stormer2010]

@Tony Manx, racist?

Looking at Poite, our win ratio with him is 42%, ~30% off from our average when isolating him and even more when looking at home.

And I don't want to hear that he has different interpretations. He did penalize Beast for sealing and he has penalized SA in the past for various ruck infringments so he is well aware of the rules, he just doesn't apply them to both teams equally.

 

[ncurd]

One thing that irked the hell out of me while I was watching the Aussie game on sat was when the Aussie reserve props came on. Barnes mentioned to them they've been briliant all night and are basically owning NZ scrum and to keep it up (not in those exact words but anyone listening to it knew exactly what he meant). This in particular drove me up the wall as imo it shows bias. He should be reffing the game not keeping score. I dont think we got any scrum calls our way (we were fairly beaten in that area but still the Aussies werent saints all night).

Whilst I don't know the words said it's actually something I noticed that happens regular after a prop change recently in NH games. If a team has been scrummaging well with little problems the ref likes to remind them the last two guys were fine so no monkey business now as we have essentially new front row.

In regards of the stats it's impossible to say anything from that as nobody ref's enough games to be out of standard statistical variance.

 

[austingtir]

Whilst I don't know the words said it's actually something I noticed that happens regular after a prop change recently in NH games. If a team has been scrummaging well with little problems the ref likes to remind them the last two guys were fine so no monkey business now as we have essentially new front row.

In regards of the stats it's impossible to say anything from that as nobody ref's enough games to be out of standard statistical variance.

Iv heard plenty of refs comment on scrums during a game but nothing quite as one sided as that particular one.

 

[psychic duck]

I think we need to be making more of a song and dance about this because its plain for all to see when you look at statistics like that and compare it to the normal win loss ratio's something is not right. I think its pretty easy for a reff to hate on one particular team more than the others infact its human nature. Given Barnes previous history with NZ its not the biggest surprise. I actually think it goes to a subliminal level Barnes probably thinks he's reffing perfectly fairly but that doesnt mean he is in reality.

It's thinking like this that will just further encourage refs to continually verge towards the favourite so as to avoid an upset. The last thing we want is the group of refs under pressure to keep the major established nations win rates intact in perpetuity. Otherwise any ref would get hounded and put under suspicion any time All Blacks lose, whilst get a free pass to see the likes of Argentina lose every time.

 

[TRF_stormer2010]

It's thinking like this that will just further encourage refs to continually verge towards the favourite so as to avoid an upset. The last thing we want is the group of refs under pressure to keep the major established nations win rates intact in perpetuity. Otherwise any ref would get hounded and put under suspicion any time All Blacks lose, whilst get a free pass to see the likes of Argentina lose every time.

That is a credible danger. As much as I am harping on about Poite I'll admit SA has been lucky not to lose in Argentina on the previous two tours with the one where we got home on the back of recieving the rub of the green for whatever reason whereas one would expect home ground advantage.

 

[TRF_heineken]

That is a credible danger. As much as I am harping on about Poite I'll admit SA has been lucky not to lose in Argentina on the previous two tours with the one where we got home on the back of recieving the rub of the green for whatever reason whereas one would expect home ground advantage.

Yeah, but in those matches there weren't complaints about the referee, neither were there about the All Blacks losing against SA last year.

We have to draw a line between winning/losing on merit and winning/losing where bad refereeing call(s) made a significant difference.

 

[psychic duck]

Yeah, but in those matches there weren't complaints about the referee, neither were there about the All Blacks losing against SA last year.

We have to draw a line between winning/losing on merit and winning/losing where bad refereeing call(s) made a significant difference.

In 2013 Argentina actually formally complained to IRB about Owens after their defeat to Australia in Perth. That referee performance in a 1 pt game barely got any publicity and nobody really cared. It's only when a major team loses like the All Blacks, South Africa, France, Ireland, England, Australia etc that a major media fuss gets kicked up.

There will be little social media backlash and anger towards a ref is say, Romania get poor decisions against them at RWC, there will be loads if say France or England do. That to me just leads to a culture and environment around referees to lean towards the expected pre-match established favourite.

In 2011, Bryce Lawrence now says the ARU and John O'Neill were 'kicking up a massive stink' behind the scenes after they lost to Ireland, and put him under pressure and affected him in the biggest match of his career. There's an atmosphere in World Rugby, that if you pîss off one of the major players with influence backstage you're put under severe pressure and career at risk. Lawrence (already a poor ref in my view) was effected by ARU in 2011, and completely messed up as a result.

Do you think any ref at RWC 2015 will dare make tough decisions against England during the pool stages? With WR already tweeting it would be a disaster if they went out early, and England carrying much influence backstage, and having the following to create a social media backlash.

The wider issue as a whole though rather than necessarily bias, is that the entire elite refereeing panel is shìt, mostly in two areas, firstly the scrum/maul, secondly the breakdown. They simply don't seem to understand those two areas and how they work. This current generation of referees is useless.

 

[ratsapprentice]

I think it's fair to say that they are clueless/incompetent at reffing scrums, but it's harsher to say the same about rucks/breakdowns, simply because that's an area that is fundamentally difficult to police.
That's not to say they are doing the best they can, however.

 

[TRF_heineken]

In 2013 Argentina actually formally complained to IRB about Owens after their defeat to Australia in Perth. That referee performance in a 1 pt game barely got any publicity and nobody really cared. It's only when a major team loses like the All Blacks, South Africa, France, Ireland, England, Australia etc that a major media fuss gets kicked up.

There will be little social media backlash and anger towards a ref is say, Romania get poor decisions against them at RWC, there will be loads if say France or England do. That to me just leads to a culture and environment around referees to lean towards the expected pre-match established favourite.

In 2011, Bryce Lawrence now says the ARU and John O'Neill were 'kicking up a massive stink' behind the scenes after they lost to Ireland, and put him under pressure and affected him in the biggest match of his career. There's an atmosphere in World Rugby, that if you pîss off one of the major players with influence backstage you're put under severe pressure and career at risk. Lawrence (already a poor ref in my view) was effected by ARU in 2011, and completely messed up as a result.

Do you think any ref at RWC 2015 will dare make tough decisions against England during the pool stages? With WR already tweeting it would be a disaster if they went out early, and England carrying much influence backstage, and having the following to create a social media backlash.

The wider issue as a whole though rather than necessarily bias, is that the entire elite refereeing panel is shìt, mostly in two areas, firstly the scrum/maul, secondly the breakdown. They simply don't seem to understand those two areas and how they work. This current generation of referees is useless.

Fair Enough PD. But I see 3 different parties here. The Rugby Union, the fans and the media. Every country's media will write articles about every game, some might take an incident and hammer on about it for a period of time. If the minnows (for lack of a better collective word) were to kick up more of a fuss in their newspapers and social media, I bet that there will be more pressure on the governing bodies to sort out the issues.

It's also true that the taller trees catches the most wind, and here the big nations are being put under the microscope, purely because of the money, and interest in their games. Instead of looking at them as the elitist and getting what they want, we should rather use them as the yardstick, see if they can make a change and then use that to the advantage of the lesser unions too.

 

[Mcfadden]

I think the bigger picture here is that after the World Cup is perhaps a few laws need to be reviewed as to their necessity, strictness of application, etc.

Small things like what constitutes a ‘reasonable’ amount of time to clear the ball (a tangible number of seconds, because I’ve seen this wildly vary). Or, for example, when can a player not be expected to roll away? Maybe some other things too like clarity around how to sack a rolling maul legally, because it almost seems completely unreasonable the way it gets policed now.

Too an extent, there are actually just too many rules. There has always been a difference between hemispheric refereeing, but if we’re going to make interpretations and clarity universal then surely we don’t want the rulebook quite as heavy as it is now. And we certainly don't want the contents of that rulebook trending upwards in my opinion.

I think World Rugby should really target communication and consistency between each hemisphere’s referees after the WC. It seems quite clear that the North struggle with some of the Southern refs, and certainly vice versa.

I’m not really sure if I feel comfortable with the proposed idea of avoiding the referee you struggle most with. While I accept that interpretations seem to vary between hemispheres, this phenomena could be due to any number of reasons. What I mean is, I’d want to see each of those games lost and understand the full context. Not just numbers on a bit of paper. It only serves to paper over the cracks.

 

[kesh]

2007 v France (lost) -- against world rank #2, away game.
2008 v Scotland (won)
2010 v Ireland (won)
2011 v Australia (lost) -- Tri Nations champions, away game.
2013 v France (won)
2014 v Wales (won)
2014 v South Africa (lost) -- world rank #2, away game.
2015 v Australia (lost)

If it's down to stats then those games in red had a higher probability of losing regardless of the ref.

 

[ZeroTwo]

Whilst I don't know the words said it's actually something I noticed that happens regular after a prop change recently in NH games. If a team has been scrummaging well with little problems the ref likes to remind them the last two guys were fine so no monkey business now as we have essentially new front row.

In regards of the stats it's impossible to say anything from that as nobody ref's enough games to be out of standard statistical variance.

This. This SO much. The number of factors being excluded here is ridiculous. Calling someone biased (even subconsciously....) based on that limited number of samples is wrong. Statistically it's VERY likely that with the number of different refs, there will be a high level of statistical variance between them. It just is. We could have 10 robots who all perfectly refereed every game and you'd see similar statistics over such small numbers of tests.

Not saying that there is NO bias, just to claim so on these numbers is statistically invalid.

 

[RedruthRFC]

Small things like what constitutes a 'reasonable' amount of time to clear the ball (a tangible number of seconds, because I've seen this wildly vary). Or, for example, when can a player not be expected to roll away? Maybe some other things too like clarity around how to sack a rolling maul legally, because it almost seems completely unreasonable the way it gets policed now.

Too an extent, there are actually just too many rules. There has always been a difference between hemispheric refereeing, but if we're going to make interpretations and clarity universal then surely we don't want the rulebook quite as heavy as it is now. And we certainly don't want the contents of that rulebook trending upwards in my opinion.

Aren't these two paragraphs at odds with each other? I wholeheartedly agree that the laws leave far too much room for interpretation, meaning that two different referees can referee a game by the book but appear to have controlled it quite differently and the poor spectator (even those with a pretty decent understanding) are left in the dark.

I don't see how reducing the size of the law book will help though - it seems to me that the opposite is the case.

 

[smartcooky]

The reason we have such complicated Laws is because one of the game's guiding principles is that the ball is contestable at every stage of the game; line-out, scrum, maul, ruck, tackle, loose on the ground and in the air. As a result, the Laws have to define ways to make that contest a fair one. In that context, the Laws around the breakdown are both delicate and vital; they are prone to unwanted in-game consequences if the Lawmakers don't get the balance right.

If the breakdown Laws allow turnovers to be gained too easily, the result will be that coaches will instruct their players not to take the ball into contact for fear of losing possession. They reason that if there is a 50/50 ir worse chance of losing the ball at the tackle, then they might as well give it away in a more advantageous field position by kicking it a long way downfield, or by bombing the opposition and having a contest in their territory. This is what happened in 2009, when "aerial ping-pong" became a key tactic. Teams were winning matches with less possession, less passing, less running metres, less clean breaks and more kicking. It was not uncommon to see 100 to 120 kicks in play in a game, most of them just aimlessly belted downfield. These days about 40 - 50 kicks is more common, and "force-back" is far less common.

If the breakdown Laws make it very difficult or near impossible to turn the ball over, then there is no benefit in contesting possession at all as the risk of giving away a penalty for a breakdown infringement is not compensated for by the reward of winning possession. The coaches reason that it is better to "line the trenches" and defend in the hope of dislodging the ball with a big hit, or ripping the ball out, or failing that, using a choke tackle to keep the ball off the ground and win a maul turnover. The consequence of this is that we end up with the "trench warfare" style of play, where teams send just a couple of players to the breakdown, and the rest flood the midfield with defenders, making it a struggle for attackers to get the ball over the advantage line. We get "shuffle-ball" where the two teams play the game in the meddle half of the field.

Simplifying the laws while maintaining the contest would not be a trivial task. Of course, we could always do away with the contest for the ball; then we might as well drop two players off the scrum and play the ball.

 

[Horacito]

To think some ref has anything against your country is not racist, it is stupid. If you think you're going to lose because of the ref just don't watch the game. Saying that puts you in a position where if you win happens even against the ref, and if you lose it's the ref's fault. It's a childish game.

Also, questioning someone's ethical professional performance without personal insight of the man is despicable.

Sometimes I ask myself how many of you were props. I was one since I was 4 until had to retire do to hernias, and I was pretty decent, and every prop who has reached a certain level knows that you are trained from 17 years old to do exactly what Ayerza did to Koch the saturday. The specifical training of props consists exactly on that: neck movements, ways of pushing the opponent out of scrum, make it look like he colapsed the first row. I mean, that's your job. That's why your prime is from 30-36, that is the reason why Mario Ledesma was able to play a world cup at 38 over 26 Agustín Creevy.

The other day, Vincent Koch was owned by the best tighhead prop in the world. End of story. It's normal: he's a rookie and Ayerza is at his prime. And Ayerza has been doing the same since he took over Roncero, who was considerably better than him. Juan Figallo is an absolute genius because he was able to compete with Mealamu at age 23, and if you're props you'll realize he is the Mozart of scrum.

Props are the only reason Argentina, with a -40 or even 50 kg less than NZ and SA DESTROYED them last year. And they did it again this evening after two awful games. They can do it because they have a master of scrum like Mauro Reggiardo, who designed a new protocol based on the new rules, you can watch it on youtube. There has allways been an argentinian prop considered the best or one of the two best since the 90's: Reggiardo, Hassan, Roncero, Ledesma, Ayerza, Figallo.

What I mean to say: Ayerza didn't do anything any other prop in the history of rugby with half a brain, anything Os du Randt or John Smith didn't do their whole career.

Os du Randt: hero of mankind, leader of men and overall genius of the scrum.

The problem is another: today, apart from Bismarck, SA doesn't have any world class prop. The Beast is a peace of wood on the scrum, Janie has lost it, Adrian Strauss could be but he's sitting on the bench. Stop trying to play the Ayerza card, when all he just did was to prove how over everyone else on his position he is. El gordo was just to good for the kid.

 

[austingtir]

It's thinking like this that will just further encourage refs to continually verge towards the favourite so as to avoid an upset. The last thing we want is the group of refs under pressure to keep the major established nations win rates intact in perpetuity. Otherwise any ref would get hounded and put under suspicion any time All Blacks lose, whilst get a free pass to see the likes of Argentina lose every time.

Thats fine but when you have so many arguable calls going on in a match how do you sort this **** out? The Refs need to be better end of story not just Barnes but at every level. Super rugby had some terrible calls going on in basically a weekly fashion. Iv been saying it since the start of super rugby this year if the Refs are going to continue as they are there are going to be some hugely unhappy countrys come the end of the WC this year.

I actually think at int level there needs to be another ref with the video ref to go over the game as its happening and make up a list of stuff to bring to the Refs down on the grounds attention at half time or even 20 minutes in. Its then the Ref on the grounds responsibility to implement that info or not and if he doesnt and a review after the match finds he cocked up majorly then its a very simple thing to sort out. Once the games finished its far to late.

Given Barnes history with us its just very hard for me believe there is not something more to this.

 

[Tony Manx]

There is a referee's observer at each match, or their used to be, who is solely there to assess the performance of said ref. He makes a report and the team managers also make a report to be considered and the performance judged

Every "arguable" decision may just be in the mind of the supporter watching for, as said previously, the supporter may not be as conversant with the rules or current directives as he thinks he is!

Also, as this forum shows, factual incidents are seen in various ways depending on whether the supporter's team or the opposition benefits!!