It’s the first match of the 2025 Bledisloe Cup, an annual rugby union competition between New Zealand and Australia. There are whispers that this could be the year the Wallabies finally lift the trophy after a 23-year drought.

The Wallabies are trailing behind in a tense competition, but New Zealand appears to have the whistle blown in their favour constantly throughout the match, with 15 penalties for them and only 10 for the Wallabies. Fans are confused about why the Wallabies are being penalised so often. Even former Wallabies player and Stan Sport commentator, Morgan Turinui, is critical, claiming that referee Andrea Piardi is “not up to this occasion” and World Rugby has appointed him in “error”. Is it poor discipline from the Wallabies or bad refereeing?

It’s not uncommon for refereeing to be a controversial issue in sport, but lately it seems to have been a significant problem in rugby union. Attacks on referees have increased, not necessarily due to bias, but because of different interpretations of rugby laws.

Rugby union has 21 laws, but most other sports would call these rules. These laws are used to determine which team the referee rules in favour of when a law has been broken. However, some can be open to interpretation by the referee.

Christy Doran, an editor at The Roar, says the Bledisloe Cup was an example of why fans might experience some difficulty in understanding some laws. While the game is not necessarily hard to understand, the laws, he says are “murky”.

“There’s a lot of grey,” he tells upstart “It’s not a black and white game.”

Laws, particularly around the breakdown and ruck, can be complicated and are often what causes a lot of issues with the referees. A breakdown occurs when a player is tackled and goes to ground, this often results in a ruck where players from both teams compete for posession of the ball, while remaining on their feet. Referees must use their discretion to decide on a number of different things, including if players were offside, on their feet, or the ball has become unplayable.

Take the first Bledisloe Cup match this year. Fans and punters erupted, calling out World Rugby for what they felt was poor refereeing by Piardi. Social media posts were filled with comments, some saying the referee was in New Zealand’s “back pocket” or others asking, “how does that ref still have a job?”

It’s not the first time that people have had issues with refereeing. In 2021 the South African Director of Rugby, Rassie Erasmus, was handed a two month ban by World Rugby after he posted a 62-minute video criticising referee decisions made by Nic Berry and highlighting 26 decisions that he felt were unjust towards South Africa, including dangerous tackles and offsides.

Doran points to another example, when the Argentina coach Felipe Contepomi called out World Rugby for there being too much “grey” in the game.

“Contepomi, a World Rugby Hall of Famer, someone like him coming out and blasting the laws of the game points towards World Rugby’s laws being too complicated or not clear enough,” he says.

It’s not just coaches or players that feel this way. David Rowe,  professor of Sports, Media and Culture at the University of Western Sydney also shares the sentiment.

“It’s very hard to work out,” he tells upstart.

“What’s a foul, what’s not a foul? Penalty, not a penalty. It’s very hard.”

While refereeing decisions can impact penalty counts and in some cases even the winner of matches, they also affect the speed of the game. For example, certain referees are tougher on jackalling. This is where a defending player tries to steal the ball from the attacking side before a ruck forms. Referees such as Ben O’Keefe are tougher on jackallers. The result of this is that his games tend to have more flow and often the most ball in play time.

Even with referees like O’Keefe improving the speed of play, ball in play time is still much lower compared to its competing rugby code, Rugby League.

In the 2023 Rugby World Cup, the average ball in play time per game was 34 minutes, compared to this year’s NRL season having 56 minutes. Rugby union has scrums, lineouts and more tactical kicking, which stops the ball in play time.  For Doran, the lack of interest in rugby union compared to other codes isn’t as simple as how long the ball is alive for.

“The fact that it’s a game of chess, that it’s a game for all shapes and sizes, that there’s many ways to skin this cat,” he says. “And if you look at rugby league, it’s increasingly a one-dimensional game.”

This is one of the major arguments made by rugby union fans, that the game is much more complex than that of its rival codes. It’s thought of as a “far more tactical and technical sport”, as rugby union journalist, Toby Reynolds, put it.

According to Rowe, this is something rugby union fans like about their sport.

“Once you’ve been initiated, it’s like joining any kind of club, you might even want to say you feel a bit superior to other people,” he says. “Well, ‘Of course my game is much more complex than that game’.”

“But rugby league fans probably think, ‘oh it’s a waste of time, let’s get the ball in hand and let’s go running into each other’.”

Despite fans loving the “chess” like tactics of the game, World Rugby has taken notice of its rival codes and the speed at which they play, as a result new laws have been introduced to speed up the game.

At the end of 2024, World Rugby introduced four trial laws. Some of these laws included a shot clock during penalty kicks and faster setups for lineouts. Australia’s Super Rugby competition had also introduced similar laws to quicken the game in 2022. Doran thinks they’ve worked.

“Super Rugby has been an innovative competition and a lot of the laws that have been introduced into Super Rugby in recent years have been adopted by World Rugby, which shows that they’re having a positive impact.”

Although law changes have sped up play, Rowe still deems the position of the referee in rugby union as “problematic”.

“I also feel that I’ve watched too many rugby union games, where I feel that the referee wants as much attention as they possibly can get,” he says.

When looking back at the first Bledisloe Cup match of 2025, some punters seem to feel the game is left too much to the referee. Something Doran thinks fans feel too.

“I think it makes it hard for new fans and old fans, to be honest,” he says. “Because old fans are getting frustrated at the inconsistencies and new fans don’t understand what’s going on.”

Article: Joshua Grobbelaar is a second-year Media and Communications (Journalism) student at La Trobe University. You can follow him on Twitter @josh_grobbelaar.

Photo: Elliot Daly – Calm down by Peter Dean found HERE and used under a Creative Commons licence. This image has been modified.