The Rugby World Cup is nearly over and it feels like most of the past seven weeks has been spent talking about referees unfavourably. Even Antoine Dupont, usually unbothered by mortals, had metal jaws on the floor when he said the quarter-final officiating wasn’t up to scratch.
Let’s recap some of the slights. Fiji were the alleged victims of subconscious bias against Wales, who thought they should have had a game-changing penalty for a high tackle by Argentina, who benefited from Tom Curry’s soft red card against England, who could have been in the final if their scrum had not been penalised against South Africa, who two years ago were the victims of a global officiating conspiracy but have overcome that to face New Zealand, who get away with everything.
Derek Bevan has noticed that this has been the tournament where every discussion ends up with a finger pointed at the whistleblower. “I’ve never known so many people talking about refereeing decisions, and I think one word covers it all: inconsistency,” Bevan, 76, says. “You make 49 good decisions in the game and one bad one — and that’s the one everybody will be talking about. You’ve got to accept that. And we do make bad decisions. It’s a fact of life.”
Bevan refereed at the first four World Cups, overseeing the final in 1991 and running the touchline four years later. It saddens him that there are no Welsh referees at this year’s tournament, given the lineage that includes Clive Norling and Nigel Owens. Bevan and Owens are friends and raconteurs who have published Two Heads, One Tale, a book recalling their experiences.
Reminders of Bevan’s career adorn his living room in the Swansea Valley: pictures of him receiving his MBE from the Queen, meeting Nelson Mandela, and wearing the psychedelic officiating kit from 1991; coasters and hip flasks from New Zealand; and his personal Grogg, the clay figurine bestowed upon every personality in Welsh rugby.
Advertisement
Bevan’s Grogg shows how the quantity of top-class refereeing has changed drastically. The inscription lists his 44 Tests as a world record, which it was in 2000, 16 years after his debut. On Saturday night, Wayne Barnes will oversee the men’s World Cup final — the second Englishman and fourth Briton to do so after Bevan, Ed Morrison and Owens — in his 111th Test as a referee.
“He’s refereed some good games in this World Cup and he’s head and shoulders above,” Bevan says. “He talks to the players. Common sense. He likes to make decisions, tries to get in the position of seeing the ball grounded himself, explains all his decisions well, doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
“Now it’s like cricket, they’re all appealing — he shuts them up. Some of the modern referees let the players shout and scream at them. We never did that. Martin Johnson was good at that when he was captain with Leicester and England — ‘Mr Bevan, any problems, tell me, and I’ll tell them.’ When Martin told you, you took notice.”
Refereeing is an imperfect art, but “consistency” is what Bevan wants, as do coaches, players and fans (though their interpretation will vary from their opponents’).
You may think refereeing has never been more difficult, but Bevan disagrees. For most of his career, he was responsible for the lot, compared to the ten-strong officiating squad he counts in the modern game. “I would say it’s never been easier to referee,” Bevan says. He recognises he never faced trial by social media, after everyone has combed through errors in slow motion. “That’s probably the hardest part now,” he says.
Advertisement
Referee slander was around even in Bevan’s days. “I stopped my three small children answering the phone [at home] because I was having abuse from local clubs,” he says. “Maybe I’d refereed Neath against Swansea and it was hatred, it was like a war, and you were on your own. If there were one or two decisions that the crowd certainly didn’t agree with, my phone would be ringing. And the language could be foul. Some people get so worked up, and social media — they can say whatever they want and it doesn’t even have to be true.”
Bevan recalls the 1995 semi-final between France and South Africa when he did not award a late try to Abdelatif Benazzi, keeping the Springboks in the lead. “Benazzi said to me [during the game], ‘So close’ — when he got back to France, he said he’d scored,” Bevan says. “I was having these letters from France. We had a Frenchman [at BP, where Bevan worked] in the power station, and I took the first one for him to translate. And he said, ‘Are you sure you want me to translate it?’
“The whole of South Africa said definitely it wasn’t a try, and the whole of France said of course he scored. What do you do?”
It took an awkward turn at the dinner after the final, when Bevan was awarded an engraved pocket watch by Louis Luyt, the president of the South African union. Morrison and Joël Dumé, the other officials in the final, had nothing. Bevan received an apology for the “bad taste” manoeuvre, and plenty of stick at work in south Wales. “All I had was,‘What time is it, Bev?’ The phone would ring in my office in work. ‘What time is it?’
“I had more criticism and mickey-taking over that than any of the bloody bad decisions I made over my career.”
Advertisement
Bevan believes some referees, now professional, are afraid of making decisions when there are opinions to be sought from assistants and television match officials. When asked how refereeing has developed, he suggests it has “gone backwards”.
“They’ve even told the referee more or less you’re not good enough to differentiate between a yellow and red card,” he says of the new bunker review system. “We have somebody else making that decision for you. So referees don’t have to make decisions any more, do they? Everything now they can double and triple-check before they award it.”
The key to good refereeing, Bevan believes, comes from being a known entity to players but not too chummy. He was encouraged to pop into the clubhouse for a pint after the match — he says he picked up most of his scrum knowledge this way, an area in which some officials struggle — but had to be equally firm and personal with both teams. The referee must be No 31, not No 1, always in charge and officiating numbers, not players and reputations. Do not referee for the result you think should happen, but respond to what is in front of you.
“Players are not fools,” he says. “You must set your standard very early on and you must maintain that standard. And that’s where the word ‘inconsistency’ comes in. If I’m stamping this out in the first quarter of an hour and then let it gradually come back in, that’s where you’ll get criticism, and quite rightly so.
“I always used to tell referees: look at the number, not at the person. ‘No 4, that’s it, you know what you’ve done, off you go.’ I always tried to talk to players by their numbers.”
Advertisement
On Saturday night in Paris, Barnes will administer justice in a final between South Africa and New Zealand just as Morrison had to in 1995 — a clash that Bevan ranks as the hardest, given the power and passion on both sides. Let’s hope all are slinging tributes, not mud, in Barnes’s direction.
