White card request

In 2015 the Varsity Cup matches which are broadcast on television, will bring back the white card by which a captain or a coach can ask match officials to review a referee's decision or investigate a non-decision.

As Doc Craven used koshuis rugby at Stellenbosch as a sort of laboratory for testing law changes, so it has been with the Varsity Cup. The white card was used in the 2008 Final, and recently Steve Hansen, coach of the All Blacks and declared at the weekend as World Rugby's Coach of the Year, recently referred to the Varsity Cup experiment and asked for its introduction in to world rugby.

There have been other Varsity Cup experiments that have already had wide use - the use of eight players on the bench to combat the need for uncontested scrums and a change to the points' system that reduced penalty goals and dropped goals each to two points but raised the value of the conversion to three points, which Australia used this year in its inaugural National Rugby Cup.

Last year, too, a patch was introduced to props' jerseys to show where binding should take place and two referees were used on the field during Varsity Cup matches.

The use of the white card in the Varsity Cup will have its own protocol.

The purpose of the white card to ensure that the correct decision is made and is not limited only to a possible infringement by the attacking team that leads to a try, as is the case in rugby at present.

The white card may be considered on a request from a team's captain or coach. It may be produced at a stoppage, regardless of what the stoppage is, in other words not only when a try us scored.

The incident may be a decision considered wrong or an infringement which the referee is thought to have missed.

Such a query by the captain or the coach will then be referred to the referee who will brandish a white card and refer to the TMO, which is why the white card can be used only in matches broadcast on television.

Each team is allowed a maximum of two such requests a match, one in each half, but if the request receives a favourable response then the team making the query will be allowed another query in that half.

The decision taken by the referee and the TMO after they have reviewed the incident is final.

André Watson, South Africa's referees' boss and a driving force behind the experiments, says: "The white card is a step in the right direction to helping the referee to get difficult decisions right and in putting the responsibility of helping to get decisions right onto captains and coaches."