An hour after the match, Eddie Jones snapped. Four questions into his press conference, Jones was asked how he felt about the marginal calls made by the referee, Ben O’Keeffe, and whether he felt England had been lucky to get the better of them. It was a fair question, but it set off Jones’s hair-trigger temper. “Why do we have a referee? Why do we have TMOs? I don’t understand the question,” Jones said. “How were we lucky? Ten replays of the video and they make a decision. This is the best referee in the world for today, they have the best guys doing the TMO, and you’re saying we’re lucky because the decisions went our way. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m sorry we’re lucky.”
Jones’s acidic answer curdled the mood of the room. He is, they say, a hard man to work with, as prickly as a cactus, and he has a habit of picking on journalists in public. Since England are winning, he could rightly argue that it doesn’t matter a damn, and so long as they carry on that way it won’t cost him anything but amity. If he ever finds himself in need of a little goodwill, however, he may regret the way he is squandering some of it now. As the saying goes, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Which Jones knows – just look at the way he buttered up O’Keeffe before and after Saturday’s match.
On Friday, Jones had described O’Keeffe as “an intelligent guy”, “very competent, accurate and fit”. This after Michael Cheika made a point of talking about England’s habit of making late hits on his half-backs. Jones must have known that Cheika has a history with O’Keeffe, who refereed Australia’s 27-27 draw with South Africa last September. After that match, Cheika called O’Keeffe “a good young referee” but then ran through a list of all the mistakes O’Keeffe had made. “There were some forward passes, knock-ons and I suppose most disappointing for us, the goal that equalised the game, there’s no doubt that [Pieter-Steph] du Toit is offside into that ruck.”
With all that in the background, Jones could not help but stir it up on Friday, when he spoke so pointedly about how much “respect” he had for O’Keeffe, whereas “obviously Cheika feels the referees haven’t done a good job”. And a day later, after a game in which so many big decisions seemed to go England’s way, he was quick to talk up O’Keeffe all over again when that question about England’s luck came up. Australia had two men sent to the sin-bin and two tries disallowed, while England were awarded one when the ball had seemed so very close to being in touch.
None of those five calls were so very wrong as one might think from reading David Campese’s Twitter feed (“a disgrace”, “don’t know why I love this game”, “ref has no idea”), but they were all close enough to be contentious. O’Keeffe certainly would not have been consciously swayed by anything Jones and Cheika said. But on a subconscious level, as he stood in the middle of that downpour at Twickenham, 80,000 English fans singing and shouting around him, all Jones’s sweet-talk certainly could not hurt England’s chances of edging these enormously difficult, incredibly fine decisions.
O’Keeffe was not the only ref who had a rough weekend. Mathieu Raynal was outmanoeuvred by Warren Gatland during Wales’s victory against Georgia. When Tomas Francis was sent to the sin-bin, Leon Brown, who had already been substituted, apparently came down with cramp. So Wales did not have a tighthead prop to send on, and Raynal had to switch to uncontested scrums, which negated one of Georgia’s great strengths. “Fastest one ever,” Adam Jones, who knows more than most about Gatland’s tactics and front row play, wrote on Twitter after the match. “This ref and TMO should be sacked.”
Rugby union has always been a hard game to referee. The very first international match, between England and Scotland, was won by a try from a scrum that, the English insisted, should have been disallowed because the ball had not been fairly grounded. But the job has become so difficult that it is a wonder anyone takes it up at all.
Fewer are. New Zealand Rugby reports that the number of referees there has dropped by 9% in the past four years. Which is one reason why it is keen to promote younger refs, such as O’Keeffe. He is 28, and has only been officiating at top-tier matches for 12 months. He is, and you could not make this up, a practising ophthalmologist.
The referee back in that first international match, Hely Hutchinson Almond, explained later that he was not sure whether Scotland’s try should have stood but that the English had complained so much about it and “when an umpire is in doubt I think he is justified in deciding against the side which makes most noise”. Years later, many of the rules of the game have changed, but one that still stands is that it pays to keep the referee sweet.
