IN THE beginning was the word. And the word was with the referee. And the referee’s word was final.

Once, and not so long ago at that, match officials had an almost divine authority. What they said went, in football as much as in rugby, and if their governing bodies ever subjected them to criticism, it was done in discreet whispers behind closed doors.

The men in black made mistakes then too - probably more than their present-day counterparts, who are fitter and have the benefit of more assistance both human and technological. And, while modern refs are often accused of being narcissists who want to make the game all about them, some of the old boys were just as happy to have star billing.

Tiny Wharton, for one, was bigger in every sense than almost all of the footballers whose games he ran. A benign dictator, he would happily stop to sign autographs for young fans before or after games - even if he did confuse at least one small boy by signing his name as Tom. (“But dad, that’s not his name,” I said, having presumed he’d been christened Tiny on account of being such a bulky baby.)

Of course, utter respect for referees vanished long ago, along with general social deference to other authority figures. On the whole that’s a good thing, and few of us would want to go back to a time when some professions were all but immune from public scrutiny. But when referees are being hung out to dry by their own employers, perhaps we have moved too far in the opposite direction.

That is not just a reference to Craig Joubert, the South African whose late call in Sunday’s Rugby World Cup quarter-final handed victory over Scotland to Australia. People said it was unprecedented for World Rugby to announce that Joubert had been wrong to give the Australians that late penalty, but in fact something very similar happened a week earlier - again involving Scotland. The only difference in the case of Jaco Peyper was that the man who ruled he was wrong was the independent judicial officer Christopher Quinlan, not a World Rugby official.

It may have been unfair and unhelpful of the global governing body to criticise Joubert so publicly, but at least that criticism pertained to only one individual. The Peyper case has actually done far more to undermine the authority of match officials in general, because it ruled that the referee’s word is not, after all, final.

Joubert’s decision, though mistaken, was still accepted as binding by World Rugby when it published its assessment of the official on Monday. The penalty, which gave the Wallabies a one-point win, was not chalked off. There was no order to replay the match.

In Peyper’s case, Quinlan not only said the ref was wrong to have failed to sanction Ross Ford and Jonny Gray for their tackles on Samoa’s Jack Lam, he ruled that Peyper had no right to express an opinion on the matter. We are used to incidents in several sports that are referred to judicial hearings if the referee misses them: Peyper did not miss this one. And we are also accustomed to referees giving their own evidence at a hearing before sentence is passed: Peyper did this too, exonerating the two Scots forwards - only for Quinlan to quote a regulation saying that match officials could merely offer facts, not opinions.

The problem with that is twofold. First, where does fact end and opinion begin? There is a clear line in some cases - a cold-blooded punch to the face, for example, should be foul play in anyone’s book - but it is blurred in many others.

Second, more fundamentally, the exclusion of a referee from a vital part of the disciplinary process drastically undermines his authority. When he gave his account of the incident that led Australia’s Scott Nowland to cite Ford and Gray, Peyper was treated as just one more witness offering his evidence. Indeed, even in the dry black-and-white prose of Quinlan’s 16-page report, you got the impression that the referee, perhaps because he effectively sided with the two Scots, was being treated almost as a co-defendant.

We need to ensure that referees meet the highest possible standards, but once they are there they deserve our support. Tacit, in the case of players and spectators; far more active in the case of their governing bodies.

Of course, referees cannot simply demand respect from the public. They have to earn it, which means being big enough to admit they can get things wrong, remaining calm in a crisis, and always staying in control of a situation rather than scarpering when it all threatens to get too much.

In that regard, World Rugby would do well to ensure their refs have a little reminder of their responsibilities throughout their time on the pitch. They tend to no longer be men in black, of course, but whether they are men in white with pink and blue trimming, or pink with blue and white, a simple message stitched into their shirts would not go amiss: These colours don’t run.