I agree with you about forward passes my tin-clad friend. They are ruining the game as officials continue to turn a blind eye to them on a regular basis. I would like to see the video ref rule on them - it might mean a few tries disallowed that weren't forward but more errors would be caught than would be made in my view.

I don't think there are that many forward passes that go undetected (though there are some). It's just that many fans assume that if a ball travels forward relative to the point where it was passed, it is always forward pass.

Which as you rightly point out is a wrong assumption. Another wrong assumption that if the passer passes the ball forward but runs like hell to get in front of the receiver before he catches it then 'momentum' means the pass can't be forward.

Indeed - that one is Stevo's fault. But if the player throws a ball in a backwards direction, but their own forward momentum at the time of passing carries the ball forward relative to where it was passed, the pass is still backwards. This is the mistake a lot of people make: they see where the ball was passed, and where it was received, put two and two together and come up with five.

In this day and age, would it not be possible to have a microchip inside the ball or some way of tracking the ball that would alert the official immediately if the ball was forward? If someone could develop a system that could do this accurately, I think they could make a bit of money. Surely there is a way of doing this already. Look at how opta track players to measure distance covered etc.

No, because it isn't the flight of the ball that indicates it's forward, as has alread been stated.

But what about instances where the passer is hit just after he passes? Their momentum would stop dead, but the ball would still be affected by the forward momentum they had before the impact. To me, if the position of the hands is what the refs look at, this should be fairly easy to judge on a video replay.

so are you saying the linesman has no input into forward passes? cos it hasnt anything to do with the flight of the ball?

[pedant]There are no linesmen in RL.[/pedant]

The instructions to the Touch Judges can vary from ref to ref. They don't [ihave[/i to be involved in anything beyond judging touch, as their name suggests. In any case, the TJ can still have an input into forward passes without relying on the flight of the ball in the same way as the ref can.

But by definition the momentum is imparted at the point of release not when the player is hit. The 'super technology' I refer to would continue to move the line forward at the speed the player was moving before he was hit - the hit has no relevance on the line - that would keep moving. In reality the hit has absolutely no affect on the direction of the pass in any case as it is after the release. If the ball was released after the hit then the line would be stationary like the player.

so do I. Quickly followed by not square, offside, crossing and grapple ref!

Needs to have some kind of fingerprint detector and also an accelerometer and GPS tracking so you know who has propelled the ball and in what direction at what speed

That was all covered under the general description of 'motion sensors'. Apart from the fingerprinting, which I will now introduce without giving you any credit or financial remuneration.