SARRIES’ NEW  PITCH COULD PUT AN END TO WINTER’S TALES (March 2013)

David Matthews sees an easier role for referees once postponements are reduced

In Sky Sports’ promotion of Super Rugby which began in mid-February Dewi Morris is pictured lamenting the standard of rugby in a typical English Winter. In this clever, spoof Fosters advert he anticipates the excitement to come Down Under and is shown, on his mobile phone, gloomily bemoaning the state of play here to Sean Fitzpatrick and Michael Lynagh. Their simulated sunshine setting is a stark contrast to the authentic, cheerless surrounds of a partly snow covered pitch from where Dewi is calling. Between November and March it is a not unfamiliar scene over here.

Into the month of March, remember there have been postponements before because of snow at this time of year, we could well have seen the worst of those conditions and there have certainly been some amazing scenes this season; the concentration of players and referees alike has been fully tested, not to mention their resistance to hypothermia. The last rounds of the Heineken Cup in January treated television viewers to a near impossible, waterlogged pitch in Biarritz and blizzard conditions for Saracens final game at their Vicarage Road home, a bleak backdrop at the best of times. In the second round of the Six Nations we saw in both France and Ireland two surfaces which looked as if they had endured a gruelling stint from the Horse of the Year Show, a disgrace for international rugby. Two lower profile examples included a match at Otley which was abandoned because of frost after sixty minutes (just long enough to satisfy the requirement for a league result to stand) and, on a newly laid pitch at Headingley, a Leeds game which went to the dreaded uncontested scrums when it was deemed to be unsafe to continue with orthodox scrummaging; the ruling on this was that there should be a replay, which duly took place at West Park (Bramhope), on an artificial pitch used by the England squad.

In none of these instances did the referee become central to the controversy in quite the same way that the French attempted to make Dave Pearson the scapegoat a year ago in Paris when the meeting between France and Ireland was called off shortly before kick-off. Reflecting on one of our worst winters ever, there either seems to have been more commonsense used in deciding on timely postponements, so avoiding unnecessary inconvenience, or the apparent belief of Rugby Union that it has a divine right to carry on regardless still applies; actually, the cynical but realistic translation of this is “If it’s on Sky television it goes ahead.”   

Just over thirty years ago the Sunday Times, reporting on Saracens v Pontypool, opened with “An instant decision had to be made [owing to heavy snow] at 9.00am when the referee rang up from Liverpool station to ask if he should get on the train. Carry on he was told as were Pontypool.” The London club, then based at Southgate, will not have to take any more calls like that from the ref (yes, it was me!) now that they are installed on their new artificial pitch in Barnet. I spoke to the referee and his assistants two days after the inaugural Premiership game against Exeter and their reflections ranged from “It was faster,” to “No collapsed scrums,” to “We came off not having to wash kit.” It could well be the future; then the sighting of Dewi Morris advertising Southern Hemisphere Rugby from what resembles the Arctic will be a thing of the past.