Being the referee in the middle of an international game of rugby is by no means easy, but how they prevent themselves from getting ‘hot under the collar’ whilst under pressure is something that hasn’t been widely discussed until now.
Along with our partners at ACME whistles, we caught up with Luke Pearce, one of the UK’s top officials, to find out what techniques he uses to stay grounded and make the best decisions during a game.
“I do think it comes with a lot of experience,” he says.
“You know the tough games, you know the games that you’re loving, and you know when you’re in the pressure cooker.
“You might look on top like you’re nice and calm and like everything’s fine, but as in any other walk of life and in any other job, you’ve got days where you’re thinking ‘my God, this is really difficult and everything I do seems to be causing another problem’.
“In other games you don’t have to do anything and you’re made to look fantastic because teams are running around scoring plenty of tries.
“How we keep that emotion under a lid is through a lot of work in terms of sports psych. I have my own set of coaches underneath my boss in different areas of the game.
“I work with a sports psych as well to try and keep myself in a ‘blue’ minded thought rather than ‘red’.
“It’s all based around a mindset system created by Gazing that helps you think more clearly and feel in control to perform under pressure.
“And I know that sounds a bit wishy washy but it has massively helped me to frame my mindset and make clear, rational decisions in those pressure moments.
“In our game it takes one head contact that ends up on a screen, it takes one forward pass or not forward pass moment that gets the crowd involved and gets the TV replaying and all of a sudden all eyes are on us as the judge, jury and executioner – having to make the decision on it.
“So yeah, not an easy skill, but one that it is something that as a team of elite referees we work hard to develop.”
Despite always having a sports psychologist at the RFU, Pearce reveals that over the last year referees have found real benefits from Gazing’s red to blue model to support them with adapting their mindset to harness pressure.
“We brought Gazing in at World Rugby level ahead of the Six Nations last year,” he said.
“They were in our camp ahead of November and they’ll be with us ahead of Six Nations again next year.
“One thing I’ve learnt with sports Psych is you can’t fit one model for everyone because everyone’s head works a bit differently. But what we try and do, especially at the international stage, is we get people talking about it.
“Personally I think it’s a huge step forward utilising that Gazing model. It’s really helped me.
“We’re talking about things a lot more. Even things that were never really talked about like pressure situations and moments of awkwardness and how we get out of them, which is something we probably haven’t done in the past.”
Pearce goes on to explain how the Gazing model works at World Rugby level, adding: “We’ve got pillar leaders. So we’ve got 6 to 8 pillars in World Rugby under the management team and one of the refs heads up each pillar.
“We’ve got two of the guys who head up a psychological pillar and they work with Gazing and put ideas forward of what could work, what wouldn’t work and just try and get us sharing ideas and talking about stuff that could enable us in those pressure cooker moments to remain calm.
“We’ve only scraped the surface of it really, but whilst a lot of our role is physical, a huge amount of our role is also psychological as well and that pressure of emotion, decision making can only be trained so much.
“In fact, we probably don’t train that side of us as much as we do running up and down the pitch so it’s definitely something we can explore even further.
“People want measurables in this world and they want to put a number or stat to something, but i have found psychology to be really subjective and individual.
“It’s something we’ve got to open our eyes to and accept that psychology doesn’t fit a mold but everyone has the ability to improve it without putting a number or level of success on it, so I think World Rugby is moving in the right direction by adopting this technique.”
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