Coventry Telegraph

Wasps seek advice from refs’ boss to stop paying penalty

- By BOBBY BRIDGE

Rugby Reporter

HEAD coach Lee Blackett plans to contact the RFU’S head of officials with a view to ‘cleaning up’ his Wasps side’s recent disciplina­ry record.

A damaging haul of 65 penalties conceded in their last four Gallagher Premiershi­p games has contribute­d to Wasps sliding down the league table.

Their fifth defeat in six games came against Gloucester on Saturday when referee Matt Carley penalised Blackett’s side on 15 occasions – with the final award being converted by Billy Tweveltree­s in the 77th minute to secure a single-point win for the visitors.

“I’ll be speaking to the referees this week,” said Blackett. “Obviously there’s a perception out there about us. We’re not using that as an excuse, we want to work with them. We need to improve our discipline or else we’re not going to win games.” He added: “I want to know perception­s. I want them to know their feeling on us. We’ve got a breakdown of all the penalties we’ve given away.

“A fair few of them early on were for not rolling away and that sometimes happens when you’ve got quite a few jackalers over the field. We’ve spoken about that and tried to fix that and this weekend we only conceded one pen when we’ve been averaging three or four pens in that area.

“We sort that out, we think we’ve collared the offside, we’ve had one offside in five games, then we get three at the weekend. You think you’ve sorted an area and then it bites you.

“I just want to work with the referees to clean us up.”

Wasps’ desire to clean up their disciplina­ry act extends to an

approach to England Rugby’s Head of Profession­al Game Match Officials, Tony Spreadbury.

“We get a report every week,” he said.

“To be fair, Spreaders is very good, if we want to speak about things, Spreaders is always there for us to have conversati­ons.

“This isn’t us going at the referee, we just need to put a big emphasis on it.

“I am going to try and ring Spreaders.

“I’ve already sent a couple of clips, and I just want to speak to him and potentiall­y get a referee into training and move ourselves in the right direction.”

Next up for Wasps is a trip to Bristol Bears, whose route to the top of the table has been based on the foundation­s of a potent driving maul, with hookers Bryan Byrne, George Kloska and Will Capon accounting for seven of their tries so far this season.

“As you see with Bristol, one of their biggest strengths is probably close to the line and how devastatin­g they can be,” said Blackett.

“The last thing we need to be doing is giving penalties away versus a Bristol team who are really good close to your line.”

 ??  ?? Wasps boss Lee Blackett
Wasps boss Lee Blackett

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