A plague of silliness seems to have overcome rugby.

Perfectly good tries are being disallowed, ruled out because the Television Match Official (TMO) is obsessed with using his ruler to check exact degrees and percentages.

We’ve somehow stumbled upon a scenario where it isn’t just a question of whether the whole ball has been grounded. TMO’s are now studying with microscopic intensity to see whether any part of it has come into contact with the grass over the line.

As so often in such cases, common sense has been the first casualty of this absurd situation. The element of probability is no longer good enough. Unless a bloke sitting peering into a television monitor can definitively say the ball came into contact with specific patches of grass, then no try is allowed.

The whole thing has become stupid. It cannot have been the intention of the law makers that a try can only be awarded if some old codger up in the stand can actually see it coming into contact with the turf. That’s fine in a game of tennis where you have two players. Unfortunately, rugby has 30 and quite a lot of them tend to be attracted to the ball when it’s near the goal line, rather like bees to the honey pot.

Surely it is time the IRB instructed referees and TMOs that the benefit of the doubt has to go to the attacking team. Right now, it is the other way round and that’s plainly unfair.

If you lumber over the try line with three opponents hanging onto you and the ball tucked under your arm, is it your fault if those three defenders fall in such a way that they obscure the prying cameras from actually confirming you got the ball down ? Why should tries that have clearly been scored be ruled out because someone’s finger nail or the hairs on their left wrist might just be between the ball carrier and the grass?

It’s crazy that this has been allowed to go so far. In the Super 14 last month The Chiefs scored two perfectly good tries against the Sharks yet both were ruled out because of dubious interpretations by the TMO. Yet the same TMO couldn’t say a word when New Zealand referee Bryce Lawrence missed a palpable forward pass which led directly to a Sharks try.

Let’s have some sense restored to the game and the influence of the TMOs reduced.