Loose Pass

This week we'll be concerning ourselves with refs, coaching conundrums, the World Cup draw, tweeting, royal scandals and family…

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with refereeing, the new World Cup draw, coaching conundrums, tweeting, royal scandals and family…

Halfway through the pool matches of the World Cup and we reckon it's about time we piped up with this one: the refereeing has been excellent thus far.

Not perfect of course, and you won't please all the people all of the time, but the standout factor for us has been the in-game consistency. While from game to game and referee to referee we've had mild discrepancies in breakdown interpretations, in games all the officials we've seen thus far have managed to lay down early markers in games about what they want and how they want it, then sticking to their guns through the matches.

Observers will go on about the need for consistency across the board in all the games; a Utopian ideal which is impossible, given the number of human beings involved, but the way in which referees have sharpened up in matches about their own consistency is laudable.

It's up to teams to respond to the referees to maximise the effectiveness of this improvement. By and large they have: it's been a tremendous World Cup as a result.

Ireland's victory over Australia has lent a fantastic twist to the World Cup draw, with Australia now set to face South African in the quarter-finals.

Going on form, you'd have to think New Zealand would be facing Argentina, while Ireland now have a shot at redemption for that try against Wales and assuming all goes to form/seeding from here on, England will meet France. Then in the semi-finals, we'll assume New Zealand will meet either the Boks or Wallabies, while we're not going to even look at picking a winner from the other two projected quarters!

It's become a perfect north v south World Cup, a shootout between the two hemispheres played on southern pitches but with dose after dose of singularly northern-style weather drenching the fans and pitches. You'll likely get the north's finest referees presiding over the south's knockouts and vice versa…

They may have stuffed up the seeding, but Ireland have done this World Cup a tremendous service. Let the cross-equator banter begin!

It's no secret that the winning team at a World Cup is normally the most settled one. So the rumblings of discontent in New Zealand about Graham Henry's chopping and changing are growing ever more acute.

South Africa marched through the last World Cup knowing their optimal starting XV at every turn – indeed, given the rustiness displayed by the dirt-trackers against Tonga, you could almost say that team was too settled.

Both the Boks and Wales look to be full in the knowledge of their best XV, while England have a fair idea… All teams seem to, in fact, except France and New Zealand.

Marc Lièvremont has long been criticised for his tinkering – admittedly he's often been undermined by injuries too – but Graham Henry's selections become more and more perplexing at times. Players out of position (no matter how well he played against Japan, Richard Kahui is not the Test winger for the World Cup final), different combinations in the centres, half-backs, back-rows… with about four or five obvious exceptions, we are all in the dark about what New Zealand's ultimate starting XV might be.

Keeping players rotating and trying different combinations are important parts of team assembly: they can be motivational tools for players pitching against each other for a specific starting spot, indicators of options in times of emergency and obvious aids in keeping players fresh.

But the time for such tweaks is long gone: Henry now needs to decide what his starting XV for the tournament is and back it for the rest of the tournament. Players need to know they are, barring injury, going to go through to the final, to develop their own little parts of their offering and fit them into the bigger team context, to get to know intimately both each others' strengths and weaknesses in the light of all the newest tactical nuances… in short, to become as tight-knit a gameday unit as possible.

If Henry does not do this soon, he may find a team unable to stick out the greatest pressures and fulfil potential: it could be his undoing.

Media focus inevitably centres as much on events off the field as on it, as social networking sites buzz with the latest player-fed gossip lines.

However, Samoan centre Eliota Fuimaono-Sapolu might possibly have taken it a little far when he tweeted on Sunday: “Ok, it's obvious the IRB are unjust. Wales get 7 days, we get 3. Unfair treatment, like slavery, like the holocaust, like apartheid. **** you”

Hmmm… we'll go as far as agreeing with every word up to 'treatment', but then…

Not much else to add. so back to agreeing with him about the scheduling: it's a rough deal indeed and it needs to be looked at a little harder in our opinion. It wasn't just Samoa who suffered: asking Canada to back up their magnificent win over Tonga by raising themselves just four days later against France was asking too much – it showed in the later stages of the France-Canada game too.

As the gap closes between the IRB tiers and the number of international pros swells, the IRB is going to have to make a concerted effort to even up aspects of scheduling, as it's more than feasible the short turnaround time helped tip the balance in Wales' favour against Samoa, in a match that was always going to be a nail-biter and always going to be decided on tiny margins.

Our suggestion is that at the next World Cup, no team, however highly-seeded or not, should be asked to play matches within fewer than five days of each other.

As the teams level the global playing standard, so the IRB should reward them by helping out – this would be a great start.

The fit of Mike Tindall into the royal family still seems to be a slightly curious one. Following the suggestion from Princess Anne that the battle-scarred Tindall have a nosejob before his nuptials to Zara Phillips, Tindall's put a few noses out of joint himself after having been snared by a local blonde in a Queenstown bar.

Hmm – things happen, we weren't there and we're not going to comment. But we do find it disturbing how more and more attempts are being made to scandalise rugby players' behaviour when there's probably no story to be told at all.

Lest we forget, Tindall is currently bankrolling The Sun not just because he was out letting off steam and flirting, he is also there because some bouncer unlawfully hacked into the bar's CCTV archives, dug out the footage and splashed it all over youtube. He is there because he has had his own social privacy annihilated.

If it turns out – as it well might – that Tindall was having a good time, flirting around as guys do and losing a sense of proportion under the influence as guys do, we hope that the weasly sod who saw fit to create this non-