On July 8, 2017, as the clock ticked on into the Auckland evening, Eden Park held its breath and attention turned to one man wearing white and an Australian in a box somewhere amongst 47,000 shell-shocked fans.
That man was George Ayoub.
Moments earlier, with the scores locked at 15-15 in the 78th minute and the series on a knife's edge at 1-1, All Blacks captain Kieran Read had competed in the air to win the ball back from the kick-off and Lions fullback Liam Williams had knocked the ball forward into the arms of teammate Ken Owens. It should have been a penalty. It should have been a cruel end for the Lions after one of rugby’s great series.
Instead, French referee Romain Poite blew his whistle – denying All Blacks centre Anton Lienert-Brown a clear run at the line after picking up the ball – and called on the assistance of his TMO.
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What happened next was a couple of minutes of back and forth that should have seen the All Blacks have a very kickable penalty to win the match.
This is how Ayoub - the gentle Australian of Lebanese background, who only a week earlier had said “check, check” and led Jerome Garces to showing Sonny Bill Williams a red card for a no-arms shot to the head of Anthony Watson, a decision that swung the series - recalled one of rugby’s most controversial moments since the 2007 World Cup, which saw the All Blacks dumped out by France in the quarter-finals.
“There were a lot of people in his ear and he said, ‘George, I want to have to have a look at potential foul play in the air,’ “ Ayoub tells RUGBY.com.au after calling time on his refereeing career, which has expanded well over two decades.
“I knew exactly what he was thinking, he wanted a breather to get his thoughts right.
“So I put it on the screen a couple of times. He came back to me and said, ‘George, this is what I’m seeing, there’s no problem in the air but the player has dropped the ball into the arms of a Lions player, who is an offside position.’
I said, ‘correct’.
“’So, it’s a penalty against red’, and I said ‘correct’.
“He said, ‘OK’. And just as he was going back to give the penalty assistant referee Jerome Garces said something in French to Romain, and Romain says, ‘Oui, Jerome’.
“What Jerome had said to him was consider putting down a scrum to not give a penalty to diffuse the situation, and that’s what he did.
“I think Romain made the right call for the game, not so much the right law call but the right call for the game.”
But isn’t the law the law?
“Absolutely,” Ayoub, who was first selected on the Australian panel of referees in 1996, said.
“There will be arguments until the cows come home. You could say it’s an accidental offside, I’m going to put down a scrum, and that’s what he did in the end.”
It’s hard to imagine a time when there’s been more focus on officiating.
The decision to have New Zealanders Paul Williams and Ben O’Keeffe and Australians Angus Gardner and Nic Berry control the Bledisloe series during the COVID-19 pandemic have once again shined the spotlight on the men in the middle.
But the role of the TMO has also become increasingly vexed, particularly with World Rugby attempting to crack down on foul play.
It was after all one of the major talking points during last year’s World Cup, particularly in the early stages of the tournament.
Interestingly, Ayoub believes the incessant use of the TMO to check for foul play must be used sparingly.
“I think that’s fraught with danger,” he said.
“I wasn’t a real fan. I’m a fan of certain interjections by the TMO, but you’ve got the assistant referees that should be watching out for that.”
Ayoub does, however, believe refereeing has become more difficult.
“The laws haven’t changed that much,” he says.
“But the difficulty has been the scrutiny that you’re put under and every decision is analysed to the nth degree and even though you’ve got this technology as a TMO, believe it or not you can still make mistakes because we are human, and you and I could look at something at the screen and I could come up with a different answer to you depending on the situation.
“It’s not always black and white, but I think I can count on one hand the real law errors that I’ve made in all the games I’ve done. There would have been some 50/50 calls that I would have made that some would and some would not, but for real law errors there wouldn’t be too many.”
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As for whether the TMO should have access to commentary, Ayoub stops that idea dead in its tracks.
“No, because there would always be that possibility that you would be influenced by the popular decision as opposed to the right decision,” he says.
Despite living in the age of technology, Ayoub wants to see the on-field referees taking greater ownership of their decisions.
"This generation that has grown up with TMOs, I think they’ve lost the art of making the call as they see it,” Ayoub says.
“You live by your decisions of course, but I think the referees – not that they’ve become lazy - have relied on the technology too much.
“For the better? I don’t know. The jury’s out on that.”
Ayoub leaves rugby with a lifetime of memories.
He recalls sending former Wallabies coach Michael Cheika from the field three times in Sydney club rugby.
“He was a pretty fiery character,” Ayoub quips.
“He was so worked up playing for Randwick once and got knocked to the ground, and I think I may have penalised him or done something and he just turned around and said ‘You’re just a wog.’ I had had enough of him and I gave him a red card and he said, ‘What, we’re cousins. I’m a wog and you’re a wog.’
“And I said, ‘Not in this game you’re not,’ so that was quite an interesting event and he had to front the judiciary.”
Then there’s the time he made his Super Rugby refereeing debut in South Africa.
“I remember my first Super Rugby game in Durban and all I remember is this one enormous South African spectator, he must have been 160kgs, saying he wanted to eat me. 'I want to take you home and eat you for dinner,’ “ he said.
On Saturday, Ayoub will be watching from the ANZ Stadium stands as the Wallabies take on the All Blacks in Bledisloe III.
And for the first time he will be able to cheer and make some comments from the “cheap seats”.
It’s something he’s looking forward to after a lifetime of service to rugby.
