Wayne Barnes hails ‘trailblazer’ Hollie Davidson as history awaits in Springboks fixture
Hollie Davidson will become the first woman to referee a Springboks match.
Hollie Davidson takes charge of world champions South Africa armed with a powerful endorsement from the best in the business.
The trailblazing Scot is poised to make rugby history in Bloemfontein on Saturday by becoming the first woman to referee a Springboks match.
Rassie Erasmus’ side play Portugal for the first time with seven uncapped players in a squad charged with bouncing back from last week’s painful loss to Ireland.
‘Extremely talented’
Salmaan Moerat makes his Bok captaincy debut and only four from the Durban matchday 23 keep their spots.
For some, the most eye-catching selection is that of Davidson as referee but Wayne Barnes, rugby’s most-decorated whistler, says it should not be.
“Hollie is an extremely talented, impressive match official,” he says. “Nothing to do with whether she’s male or female. She’s a peer and she’s admired by everyone within the group.
“It used to be with me ‘I was just promoted because of my age’, but there’s no longer that idea you’re promoted for any other reason than you deserve to be there.
“Any suggestion you’re promoted just because of your sex is a fallacy.
“Talk to anyone across the game, talk to the coaches in URC (United Rugby Championship), they all rate Hollie as one of the best. She is really respected.”
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Davidson is already the first female official to referee a Six Nations team – Italy v Portugal in 2022 – and the first to be involved in a Six Nations match, running the line in England’s home clash with Wales earlier this year.
“She’s a trailblazer,” adds Barnes of the former Scotland U20 scrum-half. “She’s allowing young girls to see that this is a possibility now.
“We talk to our daughter a lot about ‘you can be whatever you want to be’. But we all know you need people who look like you and sound like you to realise that it is a possibility.
“I have read Matthew Syed on the idea that you get these massive blind spots if you have people who all look and sound similar to each other. Refereeing has had that for quite a while.
‘Fantastic for rugby’
“We’re now going to have a breadth of opinion and a breadth of views. I think that’s fantastic for rugby and I’m proud of us as a sport for that.
“Having Hollie out there totally on ability, and Sara [Cox] in the Premiership, allows people to think they may want to be a referee, they may want to follow in their steps.”
Sarah Hunter, England’s all-time record cap holder, agrees.
“Hand on heart, growing up I could not have seen the day a woman refereed a men’s Test match because there just wasn’t the opportunity,” she says.
“It was very much referees are men and men should be refereeing men’s games. How brilliant is it that now that’s no longer the case.
“It’s not as though Hollie has been fast-tracked, ‘right we need a female’. She is a very competent referee.
“Whenever we’ve had games refereed by her she has this knack of going unnoticed because of how well she manages the game and how good she is at what she does.”
