“You can’t put something out there and assume it’s great.”

Coaches will do what they can but it doesn’t necessarily bother me.

If you get those two aspects right, most rugby matches will work in your favour.

I will know some of the personalities, the players who could be difficult customers in a scrum situation.

But then southern hemisphere teams are more skilful than their northern hemisphere counterparts, which means games can be easier to referee.

I have three tools at my disposal – my whistle, my body language and my talk.

The ones I am going to have to really work hard on early in the game to get what I want.

I could give 48 penalties in every match if I wanted to.

You are an international referee for a reason.

The objective of a referee is not to get mentioned. I tell a lot of young referees that not being mentioned is king.

Failure comes when you don’t listen.

The scrum and the tackle are the two really contentious areas of the game.

Coaches do so much research about a referee because they believe refereeing is such a crucial part of the game that the result may hinge on what we say or do.

It is a question of sometimes choosing what is – in your own mind – of material importance and what isn’t, what might be a crucial potential penalty and what might not be.

If things like that are going to ruffle your feathers, don’t bother doing the job.

It’s up to us to make sure we’re listening to improve our chances for success-if not this time, next time.

It is a question of how I marry them up to try to get the players around to my way of thinking.

Selling out was frowned on, whereas now you can major in it at business school.

Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.

We might just as well let the rest of it go, join the party, and dance our hearts out.

There’s a familiarity that sometimes shocks and annoys the hell out of me.

Nows the time to go for all the gusto you can grab. You’ll have plenty of time to be low-key when you’re laid out on the slab.

You wouldn’t want to be called a sell-out by selling a product.

I would box them into a corner with a badly formed question, and they didn’t know how to get out of it. Now, I let them take me through it step by step, and I listen.

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.