New Tournament Regulations for Refereeing

[<<] [>>] by Ian Vincent
23rd March 2011 (CqE Official News)

The tournament regulations for refereeing, for both Association and Golf Croquet, are being replaced this season. They are the regulations with numbers prefixed by the letter R in www.croquet.org.uk/?p=tournament/regulations.html and the old ones were printed in the back of the AC Laws Book. The replacement is a set of regulations agreed by the International Laws Committee, with the addition of alternative text in square brackets to make them applicable to Golf as well as Association Croquet in the relatively few areas where they need to differ. Note that they do not affect the arrangements for training and examining referees, only how they officiate.

Although the new regulations look rather different at first sight, the main changes are of presentation and terminology, rather than their effect in practice. One of the major problems that the committee faced in trying to harmonise the regulations in use in different countries were that the same words were used with different meanings in different countries. Thus, for instance, "Umpire" in our regulations referred to a player with no refereeing qualification, whereas in New Zealand an Umpire had the equivalent of our Assistant Referee qualification, and was thus able to adjudicate faults. Practice also varies between countries: for instance, some parts of Australia have a tradition of more active refereeing than we do.

The first regulation, R1, defines two types of referee authorised to officiate in a tournament. The first, a "Referee on Request" is the type of referee we are familiar with, i.e. someone who normally only responds when a mallet is raised and otherwise has only very limited powers to act on his own volition. The other, a "Supervising Referee", is someone who is appointed to look after one or more games and can intervene if errors occur that are unnoticed by the players. A Referee on Request is said to become "Active" when he is invoked by the players, and then has full powers; Supervising Referees are always active. It is not expected that Supervising Referees will be appointed for tournaments in this country, with the possible exception of beginners' events, unless relations between the players have broken down.
The second regulation, R2, describes the powers and duties of an active referee, and give him the same power to forestall the striker as the adversary has if he suspects an error or interference is about to occur. The power is also subject to the same restrictions, such as not forestalling if a fatal error is about to be made or a wrong hoop run. There is also a power to require the striker to replay a stroke if it was played before the referee was ready. This regulation also gives the power to investigate incidents that have already happened, by interrogating the players and optionally other witnesses. There is no explicit mention of different grades of referees (e.g. Assistant or Championship Referees), but there is a provision for a referee to seek advice from or refer a decision to a more qualified one if necessary.
R3 gives the very limited circumstances in which an inactive referee can intervene on his own initiative and is the equivalent of the powers of a spectator referee under the old regulations.
R4 spells out, much more explicitly than in the old regulations, whether a referee requested to act can use information gained from previously watching the game. The principle is that he should try to act in the same way as someone who has not been watching the game, unless one of the players raises an issue to which the information is relevant. An example is that of a referee watching a game who notices that the striker has played the wrong ball and is then called upon to judge how far it got through the hoop he was attempting. The referee should just rule on that and keep quiet about the wrong ball error, unless:
- a player queries which ball the striker should have been playing; or
- the positioning of the clips would raise suspicions in the mind of someone who had not been watching the game.
R5 deals with the Tournament Referee and R6 with appeals. The "limit of claims" for making an appeal has been extended to give the outplayer a bit more time, particularly if they have been called away to manage, referee or check on the potatoes! However, the principle remains that you can't appeal once you have played a further stroke.
R7 covers what we used to call Umpires, i.e. the powers given to unqualified players to watch what happens in strokes where faults are unlikely to occur, though these are now restricted to players who have played in at least three previous tournaments (to ensure that they have at least some level of experience).
Finally, R8 reminds all players of a game of their duty to draw attention to something they think a referee may have overlooked, even if it is to their disadvantage to do so.