Welcome to The Breakdown, the Guardian’s weekly (and free) rugby union newsletter. Here’s an extract from this week’s edition. To receive the full version every Tuesday, just pop your email in below.
If rugby union’s much-vaunted values were ever to be written down as commandments then “thou shall not speak ill of the referee” would be chief among them. It can border on sanctimonious at times but the referee must be treated with the utmost respect and there is no place for criticism, however much it feels justified. To many it is a cornerstone of the sport but, like much of the game, it is beginning to feel antiquated.
