Is the referee’s decision the truth of the match? Hart, Suits and the screen in the stand

When I started coaching under-16 rugby in Stellenbosch, the referee was a teacher from another school with a whistle and bad knees. When he gave a try, it was a try. The boys argued, of course, all the way back to the bus, but the argument was about whether he had been right. Nobody doubted that the score was what he said it was.

Now the professional game has television match officials, replays from six angles and slow motion on a big screen in the stadium. My grandsons watch a decision being made over three minutes while forty thousand people see the same pictures. And the arguments have changed. They no longer ask only whether the referee was right. They ask whether there is a fact about it at all, and who owns it.

I have been reading philosophy in retirement to find out whether I was teaching virtue or just tackling. These are the questions that have come out of it.

The scorer's discretion

The clearest help came from an unexpected place: a book about law. In The Concept of Law (1961), H. L. A. Hart uses a game to explain how a legal system can make its officials' decisions final without making those decisions the definition of the law.

Imagine, he says, a game with a scorer whose rulings are final. It is tempting to conclude that the score is simply whatever the scorer says it is. Hart thinks that is a mistake. The scoring rule exists independently of the scorer, and the scorer's job is to apply it. The finality of his decision is a practical arrangement to end disputes, not a claim that he cannot be wrong. Players and spectators can still say, correctly, that a ruling was a mistake, even though the result stands. If the scorer began making rulings without regard to the rule, Hart says, the game would become a different game: not cricket or baseball but "scorer's discretion".

This is exactly the distinction my under-16s were making on the bus. "He gave it" and "it was a try" are two different claims. The first is final. The second is true or false. The game needs both.

What the replay screen does

Video review seems at first to close the gap. With six angles and slow motion, surely we can see whether the ball was grounded. Often we can. But anyone who has watched a marginal decision knows the replays frequently do not settle it. The ball is under a pile of bodies; the angle that would show it does not exist; the forward pass looks forward from one camera and flat from another.

What the screen changes is not the existence of the gap between ruling and fact, but our awareness of it. Before, the referee's decision covered the uncertainty like a blanket. Now the uncertainty is shown, in slow motion, to everyone. And a strange thing happens. When the evidence is genuinely inconclusive, the officials still have to decide, and the crowd, having seen that the pictures prove nothing, often feels cheated by a decision that is no more arbitrary than the old referee's.

Why the game needs the referee anyway

Bernard Suits, in his little book The Grasshopper (1978), defined playing a game as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. The rules forbid the efficient means, picking up the ball and running round the defence, so that the activity becomes possible. Players accept the rules because they make the game possible; Suits called that acceptance the lusory attitude.

I think the referee belongs to that attitude. When we agree to play rugby, we agree not only to the laws of the game but to having them applied by someone, under pressure, at speed, sometimes wrongly. Johan Huizinga, in Homo Ludens, described play as taking place inside a kind of magic circle, set apart from ordinary life with its own order. The referee's whistle is part of what draws the circle. A game in which every decision could be appealed until it was certainly right would never finish, and so would not be a game.

That is why I have come to think the obsession with getting every decision perfect rests on a misunderstanding. The aim of officiating is not to produce truth, which is often unavailable, but to keep the game a game: to apply the laws honestly, consistently and quickly enough that the players can go on playing. Hart's point protects the truth from the referee. Suits's point protects the game from the truth.

What I would tell the boys now

When I coached, I had one rule about referees: in the changing room you can say what you like; on the field you never argue. I used to think of it as discipline. Now I think it was a small piece of philosophy. The changing room is where you say what was true. The field is where you accept what was decided. A boy who learns to keep those apart has learned something useful for courts, workplaces and marriages, not only for rugby.

The card on philosophy of sport and play asks what makes a game worth playing. My answer, after thirty years, includes a tired man with a whistle who is sometimes wrong. Without him, nobody would ever get back on the bus.