Referee JP Doyle turns his hand to stand up comedy
Referee JP Doyle took on the daunting challenge of becoming a stand-up comedian for a day in World Rugby’s latest episode of ‘Ref on the Road’.
The Irishman did a rugby themed set at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year, regaling the audience with stories he has amassed throughout his career after briefly being given a tutorial on the art of stand-up comedy. His anecdotes included a bizarre conversation he had mid match with Argentinian Martin Landajo during a Barbarians match.
Take a look at the episode here:
Doyle was formerly an RFU referee but was controversially made redundant in 2020. Since then he has refereed in the United States’ Major League Rugby and was appointed as Scottish rugby’s high-performance referee coach earlier this year.
“Throughout my career, I have always had opportunities to be involved in coaching and being from an educational teaching background for the last 15 years, this role mirrored perfectly where I wanted my career to go,” Doyle said after taking on the role with Scotland.
“The refereeing department within Scottish rugby is already successful so this is a brilliant opportunity for me to develop that and put further structures in place to what is already working well. My main focus from the refereeing side will be to help develop the technical side but also the human element. To achieve long term success it is critical that our referees maintain positive relations across the game in order to achieve success.
“Like every team in sport, you have to build and develop so another key focus of my role will be around talent ID. I’ll be out looking at who is coming through the refereeing pathways but also engaging with players and coaches within clubs as that will be where we’ll find a lot of our talent going forward.”
