Mr. Tom Ryan:

A little bit like Mr. Perry’s experience, we do not find that losing games tends to be an issue, or it does not tend to be where the difficulties around referees manifest themselves. Referees are probably doing more games than they would have done previously. They are committed and busy individuals. Losing games is not really an issue and that is probably due to playing games throughout the week and so on, which we might not have done as exhaustively before.

We have professional counselling available to referees should they need it. They can either engage it themselves or they can be referred by ourselves.

On the overall loss of referee numbers, things a little distorted by the circumstances everybody finds themselves in at the moment. In general, our refereeing numbers are holding up okay. We would expect to take in approximately 250 to 300 new recruits each year. That has been the case in 2021, which is encouraging. We have not seen a huge fall-off in numbers. We are seeing people refereeing for longer and they are busier than they have ever been.