Eight clips before, eight after
Test rugby has gone the other way. A coach who wants a word with the referee before an international now has to do it with the opposition head coach sitting in the room, and if the other side declines, the meeting never happens.
The United Rugby Championship has decided it wants no part of that.
Tappe Henning, the competition’s head of match officials, confirmed the position before the season started. In the URC a coach can request a one-to-one with the referee and does not need the opposition’s permission to get it. The request has to reach his desk by Wednesday noon, and the meeting takes place 48 hours out from kick-off.
The video process splits too. World Rugby allows five clips. The URC allows eight before the match and eight more after it, for challenging calls and asking what the officials saw. Henning edits the replies himself before they go back out.
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Rassie Erasmus was not quiet about it
None of this appeared out of nowhere. It simmered right through the Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry series between South Africa and New Zealand, where Erasmus and Dave Rennie were required to attend every officiating meeting together.
Erasmus said what he thought. The rule, in his reading, pushes coaches to take their grievances to the press instead of settling them privately.
His example was concrete. Flagging to a referee that a maul is being set up in midfield. Or asking him not to stand on a particular side at the lineout so he has a clear view of a possible obstruction. Small technical points, and not the sort of thing anyone wants to say out loud with the other staff listening.
118 matches against one
Henning’s argument comes back to the spread of experience on his panel. Ben Whitehouse has refereed 118 URC games. Hanru van Rooyen and Clara Munarini refereed one apiece last season.
That gap, he says, is the whole reason the conversation has to exist. The competition feeds EPCR and the international game, for officials as much as for players.
He went for a factory image to explain it. “We are on the same production line, delivering a product on the field. If we do not talk to each other, what suffers? The product.” No car manufacturer, he added, would let two stations on the same line operate without talking.
“The referee will still referee what is in front of him.” He wanted that on the record. Nobody is trying to pre-cook a decision.
World Rugby, meanwhile, has already begun softening the both-coaches-present requirement.
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