‘I had no hesitation. The card was out of my pocket in an instant’
We meet in a Dublin hotel just three days after his first visit to Wales since that sending off. His focus is on the Heineken Cup clash between Scarlets and Northampton, but everyone else is thinking Alain Rolland and Sam Warburton.
Did the Irish referee not feel, er...vulnerable?
“No, never,” he insists. “At one stage when I was warming up on the sideline someone said, ‘he’s the guy that sent Warburton off’, so that I could hear it. All his mates were laughing. You could look at them and they would have a bit of a laugh with you but you don’t ever think that someone would come out and do some physical damage to you. That would never even cross your mind.”
Rolland’s curriculum vitae makes for impressive reading. He won the first of his three caps at scrum-half — recent England attack coach Brian Smith was his half-back partner — in the 20-18 win over Argentina in Lansdowne Road in 1990. I was his captain that day. In addition, he made 40 appearances for Leinster, five of which were in the newly established Heineken Cup, including Leinster’s first ever game in the tournament, a 24-21 win away to Milan.
Despite those creditable achievements as a player, Rolland’s legacy to rugby will involve his time with the whistle.
Now with 55 Tests to his credit, including the 2007 World Cup final in Paris, his name will forever be linked to Welsh captain Warburton for that red card in the semi-final of last year’s World Cup in New Zealand. Be that as it may, it should not alter the fact that, in my opinion, he is and has been the best referee in the game since the advent of the professional era.
And yet it all happened via a twist of fate. “I was down in Stradbrook on a Sunday afternoon and Rory O’Connor of Lansdowne came over to me in a panic asking if I would referee a game. They had a thirds A league match against Blackrock and the ref didn’t turn up. I was notorious for having a kit bag in the car so he asked me to referee it. I said, ‘I can’t ref that, you’re playing ’Rock’. Rory, God rest him, didn’t care. So I said, ‘okay, find me a whistle and a watch and I’ll give it a go’. It was funny really as I would have been one of those who would have said who in their right mind would want to be a referee? It appeared a thankless job but my eyes were opened big time when I went and did that game. I actually enjoyed it.
“By pure coincidence an assessor from the Leinster branch, who was watching some guy on the top pitch at Stradbrook, had wandered down at half time and saw what I was doing and came and talked to me and suggested I chat with Owen Doyle, IRFU director of referees. After speaking to him, we looked at what could be done. I finished out the year playing and refereed the odd game on a Sunday and then made the decision at the end of the season that I would give this a real go. I was 33 at that stage but Doyler was pushing a system through that if you were good enough you could progress quickly and didn’t have to spend four or five years in the lower ranks. I took it up in 1998 and did my first Test match in 2001.”
Rolland concurs with the conventional wisdom that being an ex-player buys you some credit on the pitch, but stresses that it will only take you so far.
“What works to your advantage, because of the level I’ve played at, is the players can’t throw back the commonest refrain at referees — what would you know, you never even played the game.
“That is an obstacle an awful lot of referees have to overcome for the players to begin to trust them. Trust is a huge part. If the ref is trusted by the players they will buy into what he is trying to do on a given day. They will listen and will try and conform. If they feel he is making it up as he goes along it’s not going to work. Some stuff isn’t coachable and having played at the top level is a definite advantage. It gives you a feel for what players are trying to do.
“It doesn’t mean that because you have played you are going to be a good referee. There are guys who had played at reasonably high levels who tried and couldn’t referee at all.”
There is no way the interview is going to circumvent the Warburton issue. We both acknowledge that. How did he cope with the hysteria following the sending off?
“There were an awful lot of emotions going on immediately after that incident, indeed for a couple of days,” he reflects now.
“I think if people could go back and review what they said in the first 48 hours afterwards [they] would probably accept now they were too emotionally caught up in what they were saying. To be fair, it was a semi-final of a World Cup and you can understand how you get sucked into the whole emotional side of things. It’s such a huge day. But we have to strip all of that out and deal with facts. That’s all a referee can deal with.”
Was he clear in his own mind straight away? “I had no hesitation. The card was out of my pocket in an instant.”
But didn’t he think there was a case for taking a second and discussing it with the assistant referee?
“No. If you see something that clear there is no real need to get anybody else involved.”
There was a pre-World Cup dictat from the IRB in relation to that type of tackle. Is that something referees feel restricted by at times?
“No. The laws of the game are the laws of the game. If players play within the laws of the game then we have a safe game and everybody enjoys playing it. It only becomes an issue when players step outside the way the law is written and that can be in any number of ways. ”
The IRB came out in support of Rolland afterwards but despite being odds-on to referee the final for the second time in a row, he didn’t get the nod. I wonder did the controversy that surrounded the sending off have an impact on that decision?
“You never second guess selectors. You know, they went and they had their reasons for selecting Craig [Joubert] for the final.”
How did you find out?
“We were just in a room and the appointment was announced.”
So it’s just like the coach announcing a team for the next match?
“That’s exactly what it’s like. You’re sitting in a room and it’s just like being selected for Ireland, wondering is number nine going to be me or is number five going to be you. And that’s the way it goes. Because you are in a World Cup environment you can do that because you are all living together [the 10 referees].”
But the World Cup final is the pinnacle of any referee’s career. You did it in 2007 — only South Africa’s Andre Watson has done two. Did anyone explain to you why you didn’t get it?
“Well look, that part of things… you know... conversations were had once the selection was announced and I’m not going to comment on anything other than how it was actually selected. I’m satisfied with what happened afterwards and I just want to leave it at that.”
Rolland’s wife and family lived through the reaction, fair and foul, at home in Dublin. It must have been difficult for them.
“It wasn’t a problem. She was a little in the dark until I phoned her and reassured her that everything was grand here [in New Zealand]. I told her to go on to YouTube and have a look at the Hitler rant they’d done, the same one they did when Leinster beat Munster — you’ll remember that! — if she wanted to have a laugh. I think it’s hilarious and she did and when she saw that it was the end of it.”
And Warburton himself? “I haven’t seen him [since]. I haven’t had the occasion to as we haven’t been in each other’s company. But his comments [that the decision was the correct one] were very good for the game because most of the contact I have had was from doctors and parents. I even had one or two players who were injured, paralysed in a game, onto me. God knows how they got my email address or phone number, but the number of emails and texts I received from people who felt as a result of that incident that the game was now that bit safer. It was extraordinary.
“What he [Warburton] did, coming out and saying, ‘look, fair enough, the ref got it right’, that was very helpful. Not for Alain Rolland because I dealt with it matter-of-factly and if I had to do it again I would. But he has made a statement for the game and how it should be played; that will hopefully make it safer. I think what he said was good for the game of rugby.”
If the World Cup semi-final is behind us heading into the Six Nations this weekend, the issue of the scrum continues apace. As the dark arts are perfected, the problem for officials multiply. “It comes down to the attitude of the two front rows on a given day,” believes Rolland. “That will determine how the scrums are going to go. You don’t go into a game with preconceived notions but you would be conscious of the fact that you have refereed such a team before and if there is going to be a difficulty then it might in the scrum. Some teams are a little bit more difficult to officiate at scrum time than others.
“Refereeing the scrum in the different hemispheres can be different. Here, every single scrum is a battle for possession. Every scrum is a contest. Sometimes in the southern hemisphere they are happy to use the scrum to restart the game and it’s not as much a contest for possession. The biggest problem for a referee is when you get two front rows who want to be disruptive. That makes it very difficult for everybody.”
What about a bug bear for a lot of people — crooked feeds from the scrum-half into the scrum? “It’s been talked about ad nauseum and I don’t have a solution. It tends to be difficult for the referee because a lot of the time you will find that you take up a position on the side opposite the feed because there can be more opportunities for problems on the that side. Even standing on the put-in side, because you have to stand tall you have to see how the angles are on the props on the far side in addition to when the hit goes to see where the loose head is gone with his hand. Is he gone up straight away on the tight head? Is he bound on the back far enough or is he on the arm of his opposite prop.”
But isn’t everyone trying to beat the ‘engage’ call from the referee? “Absolutely. I have done a number of scrummaging sessions with any number of teams, at all levels. You can go through the cadence of the scrum call — crouch, touch, pause, engage — and they will still, even against a scrummage machine, beat your engage call because that’s just the mindset they are in. As long as they are in that mindset, you are going to have trouble at scrum time.
“Consistency in delivering the call is important. At the World Cup, living with 10 referees over a two-month period, it is far easier to get the scrum cadence the same. It is so much more difficult to manage up to 30 referees across the Heineken and Amlin Challenge Cups. Therefore you will find that there will be slight variations week in week out.
“What players want is to make sure that there is consistency throughout the course of a game and that’s for every facet of the game. In order to eliminate player frustration you have got to ensure that you do the same thing throughout the course of the 80 minutes. That is what lets some referees down. They don’t see through the last 10 minutes the same way as the first 10 minutes. That’s where players and coaches get frustrated.
“It’s amazing the level of detail teams go into. I have been told on numerous occasions by players that in preparation for the weekend, they would have the referee’s scrum cadence on their iPods as to how we call our scrum calls. That is how they prepare.”
Referees are human, remember. And in Alain Rolland’s case, they’ve played the game to a high standard. Does he ever find himself sitting back in a game captivated by the performance of an individual player?
“It’s difficult. It depends on the match. It’s simple to notice the big breaks, the guy who makes two or three breaks or scores in the corner. But because you have to concentrate so much on what’s actually happening, it doesn’t give you a lot of time to register how any particular individual is actually doing. There is so much you have to keep your eye on. A lot of my job is focusing on where the ball is so it can be difficult. But there have been occasions when I have been involved in games and you are thinking ‘Oh...that was worth the admission alone’. It happens to me every now and again where I might let it slip, in fact it happened last weekend where there was a three-on-one overlap and I said to myself — ‘Jaysus, that’s a clear overlap, why didn’t you pass it?’ It’s the player in me breaking out every now and again.”
France v Italy, Stade de France, 2.30pm (Nigel Owens, Wales)
Scotland v England, Murrayfield, 5pm (G Clancy, Ireland)
Ireland v Wales, Aviva Stadium, 3pm (Wayne Barnes (England).
Italy v England, Stadio Olimpico, 3pm (Jerome Garces, France)
France v Ireland, Stade de France, 8pm (Dave Pearson, England)
Wales v Scotland, Millennium Stadium, 3pm (Romain Poite, France)
Ireland v Italy, Aviva Stadium, 1.30pm (Craig Joubert, South Africa)
England v Wales, Twickenham, 4pm (Steve Walsh, Australia)
Scotland v France, Murrayfield, 3pm (Wayne Barnes, England)
Wales v Italy, Millennium Stadium, 2.30pm (George Clancy, Ireland)
Ireland v Scotland, Aviva Stadium, 5pm (Chris Pollock, New Zealand)
France v England, Stade de France, 3pm (Alain Rolland, Ireland)
Italy v Scotland, Stadio Olimpico, 12.30pm (Alain Rolland, Ireland)
Wales v France, Millennium Stadium, 2.45pm (Craig Joubert, South Africa)
England v Ireland, Twickenham, 5pm (Nigel Owens, Wales)
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