Female referees like Hollie Davidson are welcome addition to men's rugby - and may even have one advantage

Hollie Davidson will become the first woman to hold the position of assistant referee at the Six Nations next year. (Photo by Ross MacDonald / SNS Group)

Scots referee has shown that women can run and police a game as well as any man

With both Edinburgh and Glasgow playing their first-round European matches the evening that I write, speculation is futile. All one can say is that there are no easy games in either the Champions or Challenge Cup, or at least there shouldn’t be, even if Edinburgh’s trip to Clermont Auvergne last night may not have seemed quite as daunting as it was when the great Aurelien Rougerie was the heart and spirit of the Clermont side.

League form is not necessarily a good guide to chances in Europe. Still, it is worth looking back to last weekend. Glasgow lost away to Ulster; Edinburgh won, rather splendidly in Belfast. But both matches had this in common. The Scottish teams began dreadfully, especially Glasgow who gave away a handful of penalties and a couple of tries almost before all the crowd had settled in their seats.

All the same, Glasgow recovered to score five tries themselves and would even have picked up a losing bonus point if Duncan Weir hadn’t uncharacteristically missed three conversions. A pity, but his goal-kicking has won matches for every team he has played for, Scotland among them.

It is pleasing to note that Hollie Davidson will serve as the assistant referee for tomorrow’s Challenge Cup tie between Newcastle and Montpellier. The Scot’s appointment comes in the same week it was revealed that, early next year, she will become the first female official to be an assistant referee in a men's Six Nations match.

It won’t surely be long before she is the whistler in the middle in internationals. We haven’t had as many top international referees in recent years as we used to; it’s now quite some time since Jim Fleming was rated the number one referee in the world. Time for another, Ms Davidson, one may hope.

I confess that as an old fogey, stick-in-the-mud I was at first doubtful about female referees. This was absurd. A number of women have by now shown that they can run and police a game as well as any man.

They may even have one advantage. I suspect that even the most argumentative of captains, such as for example the now retired Johnny Sexton, will not be as ready to challenge or question a decision from a strong-minded lady, and that would be good for a game in which attempts to ruffle refereeshas sadly become more common. Politeness, even chivalry, may return to the game.

On reflection my doubts or fears were absurd. Suppose Maggie Thatcher had taken up refereeing? (Her husband Denis refereed English club rugby.) Who would have dared question her decisions? And the same may be said of Betty Boothroyd, former Tiller girl, who became the most effective Speaker of the House of Commons in the last half-century.

All the same, I wonder what my old friend Bob Burrell of Gala would have made of all this. Bob, after a pretty good playing career as a centre or fly-half for Gala, became an international referee and was also invited to referee the Oxford-Cambridge match at Twickenham in the days when that was one of the truly big matches of the season – time was when the SRU delayed their selection for the first national trials until after they had seen how any Scot played in the intensity of the Varsity Match. So Bob was a pretty good referee, almost as good a ref as he was an after-dinner rugby club speaker.

That said, it’s a fact of life, that no referee will ever please everyone – as I’m sure Wayne Barnes, just retired after policing the World Cup final between South Africa and New Zealand in Paris, would confirm.

So Bob too had his detractors. There was, for instance, an elderly Hawick lady who, displeased by another referee’s performance one afternoon at Mansfield Park brandished an indignant hand-bag and, in a voice loud enough to be heard across the Borders, cried out, “When Bob Burrell o’ Gala is hangit, ee’ll be the worst referee in Scotland”. It was a story Bob loved to tell.