Whistler's authority must be protected

WE CAN easily imagine New Zealand rugby folk in the afterlife, shaking the English referee Roger 1. Quittenton warmly by the hand while grabbing the Scottish official John Dewar Dallas roughly by the throat.

The Welsh, another oval-ball community with a highly developed sense of sporting injustice, would do it the other way round, rolling out the red carpet for Dallas before frogmarching Quittenton towards the nearest set of stocks.

It was ever thus and it will never change. When it comes to the whistling community, one side's knight in shining armour is another team's plague of locusts.

If we hesitate to place Andrea Piardi and Sara Cox in the same bracket as either of their (delete as appropriate) illustrious/infamous forerunners, it is not because their cup final decision-making last weekend failed to send blood pressure levels through the ceiling, but because big-game controversies are now so common, they are factored into the ticket price. In this respect, as in so many others, we inhabit a more fractious union world.

Ask Wayne Barnes, or Jaco Peyper. Better still, ask Craig Joubert.

When the good Mr Dallas, dressed to the nines in his high-collared coat and sensible shoes, left his footprints all over the Wales-New Zealand "match of the century" in 1905 by refusing to awarded a late equalising try to the visiting centre Bob Deans, he began the sport's original "forever argument".