Japan vs England - Sat 6.50am

[FKAS]

Those two games were part of a limited trial by the IRB (and agreed with the teams), where the TMO could intervene for anything, live, to see whether it would work to have him chiming in for forward passes/knock-ons/offsides/etc just as a touch judge would.

I didn't watch either game - am I to take it from your post that it was not a successful trial? Shame if so, I kinda like the idea of treating the TMO like an overhead touch judge who just chirps in the ref's ear, rather than the big "I have something to show you Steve" production that we have now.

Puja

Interesting, Puja. I had not heard anything about that. To my simple mind, anything that undermines (or publicly appears to) the referee's authority is a no-no. I like the status of the TMO being akin to the touch-judge. However, that was not how it panned out when I watched the game on live TV. Perhaps, this referee was not a good enough official to handle the responsibility of the experiment.

If the officials make obvious mistakes, such as not calling the forward pass in the try build-up, I have to ask whether scrapping the TMO system is the way to go. I'd feel comfortable with leaving things to the referee and two on-field assistants with reviews of citable offences carried out later.

I have to say that I think scrapping the TMO would be a horrendous mistake and I say the same about VAR and DRS in cricket. Flawed though it and the people running it sometimes are (and that pass certainly did look egregiously forward), it's nothing compared to what the mk1 eyeball would fail to see in live play. And no-one, in this modern day age of 40 cameras and zoomed-in slow-motion replays, is going to take the old-school attitude of "We've chosen to live with a single arbiter of truth on the pitch and he'll miss the same amount for both sides." If we think the whining from the South African fans is bad now, I cannot imagine what it'd be like if we ditched the TMO.

Puja

Preach.

You'd have to say the refs couldn't watch the replays on the big screen for fears of bias there as well. "Oh dear, our big screen has stopped working after we score a suspect looking try. Shame there's no TMO to check. I'm sure it'll be working again in a few minutes after we've completed a power cycle."

Some of the Irish TV directors are bad enough as it is.