First off, the Anderson Rugby Complex (West Point) is the best rugby facility I have EVER played or refereed at - and I played a year in Auckland, New Zealand. They have a turf field, a regular field, a gym, a referees locker room, home/away locker rooms, and various conference rooms for post game functions. The grass field can be seen from from all of the conference rooms, and there is also a balcony and bleachers to watch the games on the grass field. Not only that, the back drop to the field is the hudson river......Amazing.
Now this game was a reality check, these women really caught me off guard and it showed. I don't have a lot of experience refereeing upper level women's teams....I came to the game with the approach of a lower level women's game, which did not work. It was rough from the get go since I was of the attitude that I should let the little things go at the breakdown to keep the game going....but these women were good and if I wasn't communicating they began to happily infringe while I was just thinking they were ignorant innocent pretty ladies...how wrong was I. After getting hit with the ball once and almost tripping a few times I started to really get the point - this game is requiring me to focus and these women are the real deal.
Unfortunately I had already set the loose standard for the breakdown area and struggled to recover to control the breakdown effectively. It mostly lead to confusion because I had let certain infringements go before I started to penalise them. In sum, I felt I had a hard time evaluating the breakdowns - a combination of different game conditions contribute to how women form differently. It seemed the ladies became isolated a lot easier - ripping the ball from a players grasp during a tackle was commonplace, and support was typically slow to arrive in rucks, which resulted in a lot of players moving to play the ball immediately, going to ground near it and other players on the ground. There were a number of instances where ladies were not rolling away, the ball somehow got caught in somebody's legs, somebody fell over for no apparent reason.....just overall sloppy.
As the game wore on, however, I think I started to pick up the groove and pick out the true infringements from the sloppiness. Something I picked out as critical to the breakdowns was the binding, it seemed a lot of women had a tendency to just blast straight in without a bind, typically resulting in the ruck totally collapsing and a truly dangerous situation. This problem, as it persisted, resulted in a yellow card to the Navy captain for dangerous side entry (actually resulting in an injury to her own teammate). Overall Army proved to be the more legally aggressive side at the breakdown, successfully driving over and turning over the rucks. This, however, was the only part of the game Army was winning, as they were getting blown out in the set pieces out wide by Navy. I guess this just shows how important possession and the breakdown is.
This was the second game in two weeks decided by a conversion kick on full time....only on this occasion the comeback team won (Army). 22-20 final score. It was pretty emotional for the ladies involved.
Now, from a refereeing standpoint, my primary concern for this game was the scrums. They were being wheeled regularly - I was searching for that pulling front rower, but I simply could not spot the pull, so I could not penalise. I need some help in spotting this. In saying that, this game was video taped....a valuable tool for the scrum and evaluating my true TV presence....something I was trying to improve this game. Only thing is, I thought I had a horrible game...I don't want to see all the marginal forward passes and infringements that I missed...since I am sure there was A LOT!
Here is a link to the match report on the nerfu website: http://www.nerugbyrefs.org/schedules/match_report.cfm?match_id=4079
I will post the video to this blog once I recieve it.
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