KEY POINTS:
Who would be a rugby referee? It is a task that, done well, goes largely unnoticed and is quickly forgotten. Done badly it can bring infamy for life.
Kiwis of a certain age can still name the Scot, Kevin Kelliher, who sent Colin Meads from Murrayfield in 1967. Welsh resentment ruined the career of Roger Quittenton who they insist was suckered by Andy Haden's lineout dive in 1978.
Poor Wayne Barnes. Just 28, he looked as green as Luke McAlister in the biggest match of his career last Sunday. He is probably still wondering what possessed him to wave a yellow card for an innocent collision.
He would have been running on instinct, the game would be going by in a blur. Play would have restarted before he realised the enormity of what he had done.
Many a referee would be inclined then to compensate the team left a player short. But people are different. This one seemed to go into a funk, blind to the fortunate, penalising only the disadvantaged as though to prove the justice of the decision haunting him.
All Black teams are supposed to win regardless of anything beyond their control. This team failed and now everybody has a theory about the flaw in Henry's plan. I wonder if it lies in the very characteristic of Graham Henry that I most admire.
He is a quiet leader, calm, modest, not at all outspoken. I wonder if he favours players who are similar. I'd like to know why he dropped Piri Weepu and Aaron Mauger.
When the pressure came on in the quarter-final we lacked authority behind the scrum and leadership in midfield. Byron Kelleher's game has flair but no authority. Mils Muliaina was a late stand-in for centres who hadn't made the grade.
But we would probably have won with better eyes behind the whistle. Who would be a referee?
I looked for an answer this week in an autobiography of Andre Watson, one of South Africa's recent best. He was a parent on the sideline one day, giving a referee a piece of his mind, when someone said: "You think you could do better?"
He thought about it and went to the next referee training course.
It is not a reflective book but it conveys how fit and mentally sharp referees must be. No player has to be at every breakdown these days, backs go into rucks, forwards wait in the backline. The ref has to reach them all.
Poor Mr Barnes wasn't typical of the British breed. He didn't consider himself the conductor of an orchestra and his whistle its finest instrument. He didn't patronise the players or set out to show rugby rustics that the rules were to be obeyed.
He didn't seem to suffer the delusion that crowds in other countries will come back, as they do at Twickenham, to thrill to the sight of the "scrummage" and settle for a contest of place-kicks.
Who would have imagined that we would fail in this World Cup at the hands of an Englishman who did not award enough penalties, or be criticising an instruction to touch judges to reduce their intrusions on games?
Paddy O'Brien, referee-in-chief for the International Rugby Board, thinks we need to grow up. He, as it happens, has been here before.
At the 1999 World Cup he presided over a debacle described in Watson's book.
It was a pool match between France and Fiji. O'Brien gave a wrong yellow card, ruled a knock-on when a French player lost the ball in a tackle and Fiji scored, called back a Frenchman who had scored from a tapped penalty and insisted he kick at goal, handed out yellow cards to the Fijian props and awarded a penalty try for the same offence.
"All the world could see these decisions were wrong," writes Watson.
What can rugby do to avoid close contests swinging on a bad call? Other sports resort to television assistance more readily these days. Tennis has hit on a particular successful device, giving players a limited number of unsuccessful appeals to the videotape.
Suppose rugby teams were given the right to question, say, three rulings, or lack of rulings, by the referee during a match. They would certainly call for a video replay of an incident for which they would lose a player to the sin bin. And they would call for the video if they saw opponents throw a forward pass on the way to a try.
If their unsuccessful challenges were limited, they would not stop a match for inconsequential knock-ons and forward passes, or waste a challenge on a yellow card given for blatant foul play.
