Hansen wants laws changed after ref’s U-turn over penalty
STEVE HANSEN called for rugby’s law book to be rewritten after the All Blacks were denied a late shot to win the deciding Lions Test when referee Romain Poite changed his mind.
After Owen Farrell had taken the Lions level with a long penalty on 78 minutes Beauden Barrett’s subsequent kickoff was hit short, to Liam Williams.
Kieran Read challenged him for the ball in the air and in the bedlam the Lions knocked on.
The ball then hit Ken Owens, who was in an offside position. He instinctively went to catch it before realising his error and so let the ball hit him.
Poite immediately gave a penalty. But then he had a second look, with the help of George Ayoub, the television match official, and input from assistant referee Jerome Garces.
He then changed his decision and gave a scrum, meaning the All Blacks did not have a shot to win the game.
And afterwards Hansen, while graciously accepting the call, was clearly annoyed.
‘It’s a tough game to ref,’ he said. ‘We all know what should have happened but, at the end of the day, it’s a game. The ref made his decision and we’re going to live with it.
‘His initial instincts were that it was a penalty and then he spoke to his team of three and one of them suggested it was accidental.
‘If we had scored another try ourselves, we wouldn’t be talking about this. We’ll look at the things we can control.
‘There’s too many avenues that you can go down. That’s not the ref’s fault, that’s the lawbook’s fault. The people in charge of the game need to look at it.’
The laws are confusing. Law 11.6 (a) says ‘when an offside player cannot avoid being touched by the ball, the player is accidentally offside. If the players’ team gains an advantage, a scrum is formed with the opposing team throwing in the ball.’ But then law 11.7 says ‘when a player knocks on and an offside team-mate next plays the ball, the offside player is liable to sanction if playing the ball prevented an opponent from gaining an advantage.’ The sanction is a penalty. So those two laws seem contradictory.
Lions skipper Sam Warburton convinced Poite to have another look and was relieved the tourists got out of jail.
‘I just asked him to check for the accidental offside,’ he said.
‘They order a penalty and it’s worth asking the question.’