It’s one of the great truisms that you don’t notice the best referees. Like the roof over your head, or a train that arrives on time, when they work they pass unremarked. Even when they don’t, whatever you think is often better left unsaid. Partly because it is so easy to moan about what is ultimately a very hard and thankless task, and partly because it’s a way down towards the bottom of the list of the interesting things about the sport, somewhere between the intricacies of binding techniques and the variety of grass the ground staff used for the pitch.
Sometimes, though, they just don’t leave you much choice. And passing over Pascal Gaüzère’s performance here wouldn’t be ignoring the elephant in the room, but the blue whale in the wardrobe, too.
In the first half, Gaüzère was just about the most influential man on the pitch. He was instrumental in both Wales’s first two tries. The first came when he asked Owen Farrell to talk to his players about their discipline – he had just penalised the England captain for not rolling away from a tackle – then, while his back was turned, allowed Dan Biggar to take a quick, and brilliantly executed, kick to Josh Adams over on wing. Adams ran past George Ford to score.
“Every single water carrier was on the field!” Farrell complained afterwards. “You’ve got to give us time to set!” He had a point, but he should know by now that you don’t gain much by lecturing a ref. Gaüzère shooed him away.
Fifteen minutes later, Gaüzère gave Wales the benefit of a second key decision, when he, and his refereeing team, allowed a try even though Louis Rees-Zammit seemed to knock-on in the buildup. The ball dropped down and bounced off his leg, then an English player, before Liam Williams gathered it up and dived over the line.
Even the Welsh didn’t expect to get this one. Rees-Zammit sighed and closed his eyes, furious with himself for making the mistake, then raised his eyebrows in surprise when Gaüzère gave the try anyway, on the grounds that the ball had not hit the ground before Rees-Zammit’s leg knocked it backwards.
There is some ambiguity in the phrasing of the laws, but there were not many people watching who seemed to agree with Gaüzère’s interpretation of them.
Well, Gaüzère is an experienced referee, has been in Test rugby for the best part of decade. Which also means there is a little history here. Back in 2018 Eddie Jones was so offended by the way Gaüzère had handled a game between Wales and Scotland that he said publicly that he had brought the issue up with World Rugby.
A year later, in 2019, Gaüzère was the referee for a World Cup warm-up between England and Wales. He let Biggar take a quick penalty in the run-up to George North’s match-winning try while England were waiting for Anthony Watson – who had just been sent to the sin-bin – to leave the pitch. It wasn’t too dissimilar to Adams’s try this time.
“Maybe the yellow card should have been shown to the referee,” Jones said after that match. This time he bit his lip – so hard it was almost a surprise he could speak at all for the bleeding. But in a way he didn’t really need to say anything. Gaüzère’s performance spoke for itself.
He wasn’t the only one who kept his counsel. His team refused to discuss it afterwards, too. And they deserve credit for that: they would have gained nothing by complaining. It was a shame, in fact, they did not show similar discipline on the field. Because their penalty count ended up costing them just about as much as Gaüzère’s decisions did.
It wasn’t just that they conceded 14 penalties, but that they came in bursts, each often following another. It is one thing to give away three in five minutes at the beginning of the game when they were still adjusting to Gaüzère’s refereeing, another to give away three in eight minutes when it was 24-all in the second half.
The Breakdown: sign up and get our weekly rugby union email.
So Gaüzère was not the only man making mistakes out there, England committed plenty of their own. Odd thing was that despite all that, and the fact they ended up losing by such a large margin, it was the best game they have played in a while.
There were signs that they are finally starting to warm up after their cold start to the tournament. You could see it in the form of their senior players, the way Maro Itoje went after Kieran Hardy, and Billy Vunipola got busy banging around with the ball in the loose, and Elliot Daly came haring up into the line with his head up, and Ben Youngs was back sniping around the edges of the rucks.
Trouble was, the warmer they got, the more hot-headed they grew. Next time they run into a run of luck like this, they will need to be cooler, calmer and better able to adapt and overcome.