THE GREAT RUGBY REFEREE MYTH

 “We lost 56-0 sir,” I replied, as briskly as possible.

 “I can hardly read that result out in assembly can I?” he growled, stomping off.

 The prolonged adolescent trauma of playing in the school’s WOAT (Worst Of All Time) team didn’t turn me against rugby. No, it was the thousands of barroom conversations in which several middle-aged, middle-class men, mulling over football’s latest iniquity, shook their heads and solemnly agreed: “That’d never happen in rugby.” For which they had three explanations: 1) rugby officials were virtually infallible; 2) the players were better mannered and 3) rugby officials were virtually infallible.

This is utter claptrap, as John Lanchester pointed out in the London Review of Books: “I don’t know any sport in which playing outside the rules is so routine. When a player is tackled and both teams compete for the ball, it’s called a ‘breakdown’. If you watch a breakdown in slow motion, it’s common to see three or four or five deliberate violations of the rules. Slowing the ball illegally by a second or two can confer a significant advantage. Players study the referee to see what offences they notice, and adjust play accordingly. The All Blacks captain Richie McCaw, a genius, and highly likeable man, cheated so much and so well that a popular rugby T-shirt reads: ‘I’m not an alcoholic – I only drink when Richie McCaw is offside.’” In a breakdown, the tackled player is supposed to roll away immediately but “he often can’t because he is trapped by opponents”.

Every match, Lanchester argued, is distorted by the fact that teams recognise that the person on the pitch with the greatest influence on the outcome is the referee.

Worried that I was simply confirming painfully acquired prejudices – admittedly an unusual concern for a journalist – I consulted Steve, a friend and amateur rugby coach, who observed, quite reasonably, that: “When you’re analysing a ruck that involves ten players or more, and there’s someone on the ground with the ball close by, it’s hard to decide who fouled who.”

 This is why Lynne Truss, in her brief stint on the sports desk, never liked rugby: “It drove me nuts that the game turned so often (and so significantly) on rulings that were accepted by all as unfathomable.” Even experienced rugby hacks would, when Truss challenged them to explain a penalty, mumble without conviction “Oooh, offside probably”. After 47 penalties were awarded during an international between England and Italy, one veteran reporter told Truss: “I played rugby myself for years and I still don’t understand it.”

 I haven’t played rugby for many years and I don’t understand it either. But then neither did PG Wodehouse who remarked in his 1930 book, Very Good Jeeves: “I can’t claim to understand all the game’s niceties. I follow the broad general principles. I know that the main scheme is to work the ball down the field somehow and deposit over the line at the other end and that, in order to squelch this programme, each side is allowed to put in a certain amount of assault and battery which, if done elsewhere, would result in fourteen days [in jail] and some strong remarks from the judge.”

Wodehouse was protesting too much. His summary grasps the niceties of rugby rather well.