Much has been said about the standard of referees, their selection and accountability as the crescendo of criticism continues to grow raucously in the Tri-Nations, running over into violent intervention in the Durban Test.

How do referees get there and what happens to them when they are there ?.

Referees start by joining a local referees' society which provides them with many of the tools of their trade, for example regular information about the laws and refereeing in general. That would happen in his area. His society would be one of several in his country. He would be helped and, when thought suitable to referee, would start at a low level. He would then be evaluated and assessed for grading. He would progress through the grades within his local society and then be recommended for regional and then national panels, where the process of advancement would continue till recommendations are made to the International Rugby Board to have the referee considered for international duty.

By the time he gets this far he is already most of the way up the referees' ladder. He has already achieved a great deal.

The following are rough numbers of referees in some of the IRB countries as contained in the IRB handbook of 1999:

The top panels of IRB referees come from those countries. There are 24 of them - 24 out of 22000. Those 24 are divided into two panels with 16 on the A Panel and 8 on the B Panel.

Who picks the top referees?

Within a country there are people who evaluate and train referees, and there are those who sift to find the top referees.

Then the International Rugby Board has committees concerned with refereeing matters - a Laws Committee, which attends to the Laws of the Game, a Referees' Committee, which sees to all aspects of the management of referees off the field, and a Selection Committee. The selection Committee draws up the panels of international referees, appoints them to matches and sends people along to assess them. In addition the IRB has staff members who do much of the running of rugby. The top man there is Steve Griffiths, once an international referee himself, now the organiser of elite referees and of referees at the many tournaments that happen internationally. Bruce Cooke is responsible for training referees and coaches below the elite level.

Who are the selectors - the men who pick and appoint referees?

The chairman is Tim Gresson of New Zealand, appointed to the post by the IRB.  He is also the chairman of the KIRB Referees' Committee. The other members, appointed by the Referees' Committee, are Dick Byers (Australia) and Dave Burnett (Ireland), both former international referees of repute. Kees Blaas (Netherlands) and Ricardo Bordcoch (Argentina) are members from outside of the foundation unions of the IRB, a requirement of the IRB Council since 1999.

Who are those top referees?

The IRB has two panels. They are merit panels. There is no requirement to have a referee from each powerful country:

A Panel: Andrew Cole (Australia), Pablo Deluca (Argentina), Stuart Dickinson (Australia), Wayne Erickson (Australia), Tappe Henning (South Africa), Paul Honiss (New Zealand), Jonathan Kaplan (South Africa), Steve Lander (England), Alan Lewis (Ireland), Peter Marshall (Australia), David McHugh (Ireland), Paddy O’Brien (New Zealand), Steve Walsh (New Zealand), André Watson (South Africa), Chris White (England), Scott Young (Australia).

B Panel: Donal Courtney (Ireland), Kelvin Deaker (New Zealand), Giulio de Santis (Italy), Joël Jutge (France), Mark Lawrence (South Africa), Alain Rolland (Ireland), Tony Spreadbury (England), Andy Turner (South Africa), Nigel Whitehouse (Wales), Nigel Williams (Wales).

What do the selectors pick on?

They get assessments and they are sent videos and they see referees in action.

What are assessments?
  
They are written reports on referees made by people experienced in refereeing matters and trained to be assessors.

The assessments are detailed in every facet of the game, including the tackle, playing advantage, the scrum, line-out, the ruck and the maul and kicks. It looks at control and management and then makes a bigger fuss about errors in law and "critical incidents", those decisions that have an effect on the outcome of the match. The assessments are both quantitative and qualitative, where quantitative is the number of times a referee makes an error, verified by video evidence. There is intense detail of each bit of play as the game develops - as for each scrum, tackle, line-out, kick-off, turnover, ruck, maul, penalty and perceived error.

Then what happens to these assessments/evaluations?

They are sent to the IRB and a report is then sent regularly to the referee's national union and to the referee himself.

Do the players have no say at all?

Yes, they do - or they could do. Teams are required to send in their reports on referees for each big match.  The fact is that few international teams actually fill in the coach-captain reports on referees.

How often are referees assessed?

"I write an exam every week," said André Watson, one of the top referees in the world. "I get assessed every time I referee. I'd expect to be assessed about 30 times a year."

At the top referees are assessed in all representative matches - that would mean provincial matches, Super 12 matches, European Cup and Shield matches and international matches at all levels.

Who are these assessors?

The IRB has two panels of assessors:

A Panel: Stuart Beissel (New Zealand), Tom Doocey (New Zealand), Bob Francis (New Zealand), Colin High (England), Stephen Hilditch (Ireland), Jim Irvine (Ireland), Douglas Kerr (Scotland), Brian Kinsey (Australia), Michel Lamoulie (France), Brian Leigh (England), Sandy MacNeill (Australia), Frans Muller (South Africa), Patrick Robin (France), Ian Scotney (Australia), Stuart Thomson (Scotland), Louis Wessels (South Africa), Robert Yemen (Wales).
B Panel: Tom Aplin (Ireland), James Apollis (South Africa), Jim Bailey  (Wales), Mel Jones (Canada), Mick Keogh (Australia), David Leslie (Scotland), Don Morrisson (USA), Bryan Porter (USA), Giovanni Romano (Italy), Gabriele Villari (Italy).

The majority of the assessors were international referees.

Assessors are trained, tested and accredited every year. They have guidelines/parameters in which they assess in an effort to attain a uniform standard of assessing.

Right, there they are. Then what? There is the frequent accusation that they just stay there.

In a season a referee would have his fitness tested about three times. Fitness tests vary from country to country but would test four components of fitness - speed, endurance, agility and recovery. (The IRB has minimum requirements for endurance and speed. For those familiar with the bleep test for endurance, a referee would be required to do a minimum of a 12.) The referee would be tested in his knowledge of the laws. The referee would be tested and have development opportunities in man management.

Yes, but what happens if he does not perform?

The simple answer is that the selectors then have the power to exclude him from panels and therefore from international matches. The IRB will also on occasions not appoint referees to matches to give him the opportunity to get over a "bad patch". When the IRB announced its last panels some referees were dropped - Joël Dumé and Didier Méné of France, and Rob Dickson and Iain Ramage of Scotland. There are also cases where retirements of top referees have been influenced (allegedly) by selectors' feedback.
 
Does a referee get dropped every time he makes a mistake?

No - no more than a player does.

Andrew Mehrtens is one of the great goal-kickers of world rugby. They say his success rate is 72 percent. That means his failure rate is 28 percent. Imagine if a referee's failure rate were 28 percent.

Take the details of an uncontroversial Test - Australia vs France recently.

Apart from lots of other decisions the referee made, like management, like advantage, like which running lines to make, he had to control the following situations:

Scrums: 18 + 6 resets = 24    Line-outs: 34     Tackles: 65      Rucks & mauls: 75      Penalties: 21     Restart kicks: 14

That would mean 233 places where he was directly involved. If he got 28 percent wrong, he would have made 65 mistakes! That, of course, is unthinkable. He would not have got off the lowest rung of referees - be something like Number 22000 in the world!

Referees get points for each assessed match. The process is reductive. They start with 100 percent and lose marks for quantitative errors and qualitative views. A Test referee would be expected to get at least 85 percent.

Are referees paid?

At international level they are paid, though throughout the world most referees, like most players, are not paid.

Of the 16 referees on the A Panel only two do not have refereeing as their sole job. Of the eight on the B Panel only two have refereeing as the sole job.

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