What is a trend?
- Is it an act by an individual player?
- Could it be similar technical infringements?
- Is it caused by tactics by a team in red zone or under pressure?
Are they a negative attitude generally leading to frustration?
As referees, our intervention needs to be relevant. Our intervention could be:
- too early?
- too late?
- not at all?
Awareness is key to identifying trends.
At various stages in the game you can reflect on the state of the game. This might be during an injury time, while waiting for a conversionor penalty kick, or while speaking with your AR at a lineout. These will vary during each game, but you need to build a process/trigger to use these opportunities to refelect on what has been happening.
You could verbalise your thoughts, this embeds them further in yoyur thinking (explanation of decisions).
Make it meaningful so you remember. Create a thought process around your game awareness.
Tips for Identification
- Tackle – Am I getting quick ballat breakdown? (lots of not roll away PKs?)
- Space – Is there spacefor players to attack? (offside PKs?)
- Scrum / Lineout – Am I getting good set pieceoutcomes? Ball out at scrum cleanly. Fair contest at Lineout?
- Red zone – Is the team giving away a lot of penalties on defencein their own 22?
Match Official Developers could run a Role Play activity with referees so that they can practice delivering messages regarding trends that might be identified in a game e.g.
- Tighthead collapsing scrum
- Closing lineout gap
- Taking too long to set lineout
- Repeated high tackles
- Ruck offside
Taken from:
NSW Rugby Referees Level 1 Extension Module Developed by Alex Richards