World Rugby has confirmed that assistant referee Marius van der Westhuizen has been stood down from Saturday’s Grand Slam-deciding Six Nations fixture between England and Ireland after a rumpus around attending an England training session.
Nigel Owens of Wales will now take over the AR2 position, assisting referee Angus Gardner (Australia) and fellow AR Jaco Peyper (South Africa). Ben Skeen (New Zealand) remains as the TMO.
“Marius is an outstanding talent with a big international future and both he and his employer SARU fully support the decision.”
World Rugby has also clarified with teams that, in addition to the regular pre-match coach and referee meetings, senior elite teams will continue to have the opportunity to request a member of the high-performance match official panel to train with them, providing that the individual is not a member of the match official team officiating that team at a later date within the current competition or test window.
RugbyReferee.net’s view: Clearly we should start by saying that Marius is not at fault here. England asked for a Southern Hemisphere referee to help them with their breakdown problems (having had 16 penalties given against them by Jaco Peyper last weekend). Rather than fly someone in (Jaco not appropriate, Gus in charge this weekend), World Rugby offered them Marius who was in London, having assisted Jaco last weekend. He merely obliged his chain of command. Marius is a professional referee and his integrity matters a lot, as it does to all us referees. We’re 100% confident that there would be no influence sought or offered ahead of Saturday’s fixture, but the perceptions and conjecture around it don’t help. So this is the correct outcome, but was a situation created by World Rugby. Someone should really have thought this all through and spotted the potential problem before putting Marius into that position.
Individual players are still not “getting it” with respect to high tackles and something should be done about it. ie Those repeaters will have their names given to refs to watch more closely, (Not punished any differently) so they will be discouraged in said penalties and further identified if it continues.