Leinster vs Connacht

Referees
Corner
BY DAN WALLACE
Welcome to another edition of Referees Corner. A warm
welcome to Chris Busby and his refereeing team. Chris is
a member of the IRFU High Performance referee team and
has been rising steadily through the ranks over recent
years. He made his URC refereeing debut - then PRO14 - on
9 October 2020 refereeing the match between Zebre and
Dragons. He recently refereed Russia v Chile and was AR2
for Portugal v Japan.
On the domestic refereeing front,
we have had a very busy start
to the season this year in the
Metropolitan Area. Our referees
were back on the pitch from mid-
August with the early season
cups. We had teams of three in
most of the cup competitions. It
is great to work as a team of
three as normally you are on
your own doing a match with
club appointed touch judges, so
to work with your colleagues
in a game is always a welcome
experience.
In the Metro Area, there are currently
133 referees and 13 trainee referees.
Referees across the province are broken
down into Panels: Panel A to Panel
F. Each panel is assigned games in
different leagues, for example Panel
A referees look after games in Leinster
League Division 1A/1B, JP Flanagan
U-20 Divisions 1 and 2, and Metro 1.
Panel A also looks after sub referee
duties for AIL Division 1A/1B and
Women’s AIL.
On any given weekend referees are
selected to adult games by their Panel
Managers and to Youth games by their
Area Representative, so for example
they could be doing an U-13 boys
Want to get
involved?
Feel free to make contact with the Leinster Rugby Referees
at hayley.whyte@leinsterrugby.ie If you are interested
in becoming a referee get in contact with us through our
Facebook, our website www.leinsterrugbyreferees.ie or
through twitter @leinsterreferee.
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