Steve Walsh - was he pushed ?

No 7&1/2 wrote:Incidentally Pete I think Owens is a fantastic ref but he's made some blatent mistakes. Respect the refs and the hard jobs they do.

Poorfour wrote:

GunsGerms wrote:The problem with Barnes once again is that he treats some teams differently and his decisions are not consistent so therefore not predictable. Ireland were penalised 10 times and Wales 11 times. This is despite Ireland having vastly more posession and terrotity and Wales defending way more rucks and defending way more in general. Im sorry but his refereeing does not add up to anything remotely consistent or fair whatsoever at all.

Well, you're entitled to your opinion, but World Rugby doesn't agree, does it? And it didn't agree with me about Walsh.

But having trained as a ref, I now watch their decision-making very closely. Every ref has occasional howlers but it is very rare to see a ref consistently making decisions for which there is no sound technical justification. (The only example I can think of is Steve Walsh's repeated failure to spot - or even look for - Adam Jones's illegal bind in the 2012 Wales-England match)

For several years, Barnes refereed pretty much every game between Quins and Tigers, and Quins always seemed to get the worst of it. There were some bad mistakes (carding Will Skinner for picking up a ball that had popped out of a scrum - one he admitted at a talk on refereeing I attended), but far more cases where he had spotted something that was not immediately obvious to the crowd but was technically entirely justifiable.  I may not have liked the decisions, and I'm fully aware that another ref might have interpreted the same event differently. But his decisions were not wrong.

The only thing a ref can do is set out his stall for how he wants to ref the game, be consistent in his decisions and clear in his explanations, and give the captains a fair hearing if they want clarification or to bring something to his attention. Barnes wasn't being inconsistent, he was being consistent with his own standards - the fact that it's happened twice should tell you that. The problem is that Ireland were consistently playing in a way that led to infringements.

Teams play the game in different ways. That means that sometimes that will suit what the ref is looking for and sometimes it won't. Tough. What he can't do is try to referee to the style of both teams, because that would mean applying different standards and it would be almost impossible to avoid bias.

The only practical option for a ref when confronted by two different styles is to adjust his view of what is material. Owens and the French refs do this well: they will tolerate a certain amount of mess, and a certain level of infringement in the game as long as it is not interfering with the flow of the game and giving the less-infringing side a consistent disadvantage.

Barnes (and Clancy) are much more in the mould of blowing up for whatever they see. I know whose style I prefer - and it's telling that of 10 refs on the international panel, 4 are French and one is Owens.

No 7&1/2 wrote:There's none so blind as those that won't see!