Black marks: How to wear down the ref
Steve Hansen likes to bang on about the All Blacks bench, but against the French the biggest impact came from the Eden Park crowd. Go on, give yourself a shout, lads and lasses. You have now gone a staggering 41 games unbeaten. On Saturday you were the biggest difference between the two teams. This was a crushing victory for people power.
The young English referee Luke Pearce eventually folded like a cheap deck chair on Brighton beach. The 30-year-old succumbed to the noise and opinion coming from the stands. And Pearce wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last official to be broken at Eden Park.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not a criticism of the Eden Park crowd. Anything but. The great home crowds have the power to influence the outcome of games. I think first of Boca Juniors, the football club in the working-class heart of Buenos Aires. The fans climb and rattle the fencing while all around flashes and bursts of white light, smoke and great jets of noise thunder down onto the pitch.
Eden Park isn’t like that, not at all. Eden Park is black. My friend, let’s call him Doctor CC, goes to Eden Park a lot and yet he was still overwhelmed by the sense of blackness on Saturday.
To steal from Dylan, the fans can take the dark out of the night-time and paint the daytime black. How appropriate that those lyrics should come from the album Bringing It All Back Home.
The All Blacks fans brought it all back home on Saturday. But it’s a different sort of fanaticism. Eden Park can have long periods of almost eerie silence. And then something happens.
On Saturday the moment came just before halftime. When Pearce correctly ruled out a try because of Aaron Smith’s obstructing running line, the referee got the bird. A minute later Aaron Smith started running to take a quick tap and the ref slowed him down. More outrage. And right on halftime, when the All Blacks were held up over the line, the ref got another spray.
Pearce had held the line until halftime, but the damage had been done. Four minutes into the second half, Pearce ruled for an All Blacks scrum after a French breakout. The French prop actually had his knee on the ground well before Pearce called for a maul, but the ref was already on his way out of there. The crowd loved him for the decision. The Englishman was feeling the love and the poor bloke is only human after all. Subconsciously the gales of advice blowing from the stands already had him leaning one way. And it wasn’t towards France. So when Ryan Crotty threw his head back in exaggerated anguish and the crowd bayed like dogs on a hunt, there was only ever going to be one outcome.
Pearce didn’t bother to go upstairs to the TMO. The reaction of the crowd had made up his mind. The French lock went to the bin. It brought back memories of 2013. South Africa were well in the test match when the crowd turned feral and Bismarck du Plessis was given a yellow card for a perfectly legitimate tackle on Dan Carter.
In New Zealand Carter was a protected species. Du Plessis was now a marked man. When Liam Messam threw up his arms in the second half and the New Zealand prop Tony Woodcock made a forearm gesture, the South African received a red card.
And guess who the TMO was on that occasion. Yes, it was our old friend from Australia, gormless George Ayoub, the world’s worst top-level official. So where was George when Sam Cane hit Remy Grosso on the chin with his arm and Ofa Tu’ungafasi then buried his shoulder into the French wing’s forehead.
Pearce couldn’t wait to look for excuses. ‘‘Clash of heads, that was all,’’ he said.
This is what TMOs are for. Away from the hurly burly they can give impartial advice of the sort Ben Skeen was giving in Australia. But Ayoub was no help at all. He didn’t say the first impact was to the chin. He didn’t say it was Tu’ungafasi’s shoulder that fractured Grosso’s head. He didn’t say that the Frenchman’s running height barely shifted through the contact zones.
That abnegation was scandalous. The young ref you can feel some sympathy for, just as you could sympathise with Ben O’Keeffe in South Africa. He also lost it in the second half in front of a seething Ellis Park crowd of 55,000. He also sent a man to the bin quite wrongly without first bothering to review the incident. Crowds get in the head. Mob rule.
As my friend said about Eden Park: ‘‘It’s hard to get to, the people are all in black, it’s a dark environment.’’ And two rows back there is always the guy who knows it all. He is shouting at the ref. And the crowd follows. The noise swells. The All Blacks milk it. What’s a ref to do? He can’t help but turn to the dark side.