No doubt about it, it's the pantomime season – in rugby as well as on the stage.

Just when we thought the dross of autumn was behind us, the recent round of Guinness Premiership matches conspired to insist that 'Oh, No It's Not!'. Just when we thought that the Ugly Sisters (aerial ping-pong and pick-and-drive) had been put in their place by the Prince Charming that is the Heineken Cup, a whole host of villains have invaded centre-stage to demand our catcalls. Up and down the country, theatre audiences and rugby crowds are facing an identical question: who do you boo?

Probably not the players. Nearly always cast as the good guys, they may have seen their collective halo slip during the Bloodgate and cocaine scandals of the summer but, in the eyes of a public, ever-ready to forgive their heroes and forget their misdemeanours, they remain favourites at the box-office .

Probably not the International Rugby Board. They, in a sense, are the game's script-writers, removed from the action, faceless, anonymous and, although holding ultimate responsibility, not really participatory in any interaction between performers and public. What about the coaches, the directors of the action, the men responsible for show-casing the talent?

The bad reviews certainly rained down on them in the autumn as the number of tries per match plummeted to new lows.

Coaches were widely perceived as rabbits caught in the twin headlights of the IRB's new laws about kicking from hand and the referees' new interpretation of the tackle law, while their solutions were condemned as risk averse, safety first and mind-numbingly boring.

At the same time, it seemed that in their obsession with defence they had taken their eyes off attack; in preaching the importance of preventing the opposition from scoring tries, they had overlooked the importance of working out a way to score themselves.

Yet even they seemed to be basking in that warm fuzzy feeling engendered by the season of goodwill.

Leicester took maximum points in a Premiership match, Leinster, Munster and London Irish turned on the spectacle in Europe and one expert was so inspired by what he saw that he claimed to detect a change of thinking among coaches; laws and interpretations may be flawed, he argued, but the coaches had come up with a solution that could well rescue rugby.

And the men in black were also given some credit. Referees these days may be forced to wear increasingly garish jerseys but they rarely play any other roles than that of the 'Men We Love to Hate.' But even they were given the credit for a string of entertaining Heineken Cup games, the theory being that through their repeated cajoling of players they were at last getting the message across about the tackle area, while their willingness to use the yellow card in the early stages of a match was thought to be the ideal way to reverse the cynicism and skullduggery to which too many matches had too easily succumbed. Until last weekend, when an astonishing outburst from Saracens' director of rugby Brendan Venter set the cat among the pigeons and sent the mandarins rushing to the rule-book. Saracens may still be top of the Premiership, but they have lost their last two matches and Venter was not only adamant that they didn't deserve to lose, but also insistent that the refs were to blame.

He may have thought that he was softening his criticism by insisting that the officials were not malicious but merely bad, and he may have received some support from journalists whose defence of the freedom of the press is immeasurably more strident when a juicy quote is involved. But Venter was not just one-eyed – most neutrals could see that his version of the incident whereby his captain Steve Borthwick was yellow-carded was open to a completely different interpretation – he was misguided – his suggestion that referees should prepare for a match by studying tapes of the teams they are about to referee has every chance of rebounding on his own team – he was wrong – to disclose details of discussions he had had the previous week with referees administrator Ed Morrison – and he broke the code of conduct he had signed up to at the start of the season.

Leicester's Richard Cockerill was given a one-month touchline ban when he breached that code and abused match officials. Venter can expect to spend a lot longer on the sidelines. Boo. Hiss.