Dear World Rugby,
You got this World Cup wrong from the draw.
Doing it four years ago was a mistake that resulted in four teams that could have been finalists pitted against each other in the quarter finals.
The games between the All Blacks and Ireland and France and the Springboks ought to have been finals. Instead they were games that eliminated two of the better teams and let England, a team that made it into the semi-finals by playing a game more like football.
You appear to have learned from that and will make the draw for the next World Cup closer to the event.
But there are more changes you must make and one of the most important ones is that is to the place of off-field referees.
The TMO should be there to act on the request of the on-field referee to decided if a try’s s scored or not, or if play was dangerous or not.
The TMO and the others replaying and replaying possible infringements should not be acting as referees.
The time to tell the on-field referee he missed something or got a call wrong in the heat of the moment, is after the match when his performance is reviewed. It shouldn’t be during the game and especially not when it means, as it did in the final, that a try is disallowed because of something that happened several minutes earlier and was only apparent in repeated replays.
Rugby is a game of skill at speed. It is impossible for referees to see and adjudicate correctly every single action and reaction from players. They have to react quickly and they won’t always get it right, but better that than disruptions of the game from off-field interventions many minutes after the fact.
Those disruptions merely move controversy from the referee on the field to those off it and turn the game from the spectacle it ought to be to a stop-start exercise in frustration for players and spectators.
You also need to look at the rules around red cards.
Rugby has the potential for very serious injury. Everything possible must be done to prevent that and to punish players who infringe. It is fair that a player guilty of dangerous play is sin binned but that should be time limited and any further consequence should be left to the judiciary after the game.
Others with a lot more knowledge of the game and its rules may well be able to add other changes that need to be made.
And make them you must to ensure that rugby remains the running, passing, tackling spectacle requiring split second decisions from players and referees it ought to be.
Some of those decisions will be wrong, but will still be better than delayed ones based on repeated replays from off-field officials.
You can’t get perfection and complete fairness in an imperfect and unfair world and trying to is taking the fun, and the sport, out of the game.
Homepaddock 