Wretched ref can’t excuse this shambles
FOR the second time in a week, the numbers did not add up for an England team. In India, the cricketers could not excuse 112 and 81; for the rugby players in Cardiff, the vital statistics were 40, 14 and 24-24.
The most points conceded by England against Wales; the number of penalties England served up in the match; and the score at 62 minutes before England’s team discipline fell apart again.
And, just as the cricketers could not make a convincing scapegoat of the pitch in Ahmedabad having lost 20 wickets for less than 200 runs, the final 18 minutes in Cardiff made complaints about referee Pascal Gauzere moot.
Gauzere was abysmal, but so were England. They matched each other in incompetence. Owen Farrell was therefore wise not to be drawn on the random nature of Gauzere’s performance. It would simply have opened the door to criticism closer to home.
However erratic the surface, 112 and 81 are not cricket scores. However poor Gauzere’s officiating, any side conceding 14 penalties does not deserve to win a game of rugby. It speaks of an absence of game intelligence, an arrogance in consistently getting on the wrong side of the referee.
Warren Gatland sat in the stand watching Maro Itoje, who some are proposing as his next Lions captain. Itoje gave away five penalties, taking his total in this tournament to 10, including a match with Italy.
How could Gatland make that player his captain, given that one of his roles would be to have a smooth relationship with authority?
‘Go and have a word with your team,’ Gauzere told Farrell on Saturday. What might a referee tell Itoje? Go and have a word with yourself?
Gauzere was guilty of many of the same sins as England. Arrogance? Check. Absence of game intelligence? That, too. Allowing play to restart before the first Wales try after little more than a private conversation with Dan Biggar was a rogue act.
The referee would have seen where England’s wingers had come from to be party to an England team meeting Gauzere had as good as called, and he should have appreciated the need to return to their starting position.
What he did made this impossible. It was unsporting; it was unfair. When Farrell complained, he treated him with haughty disdain.
‘I speak first,’ said Gauzere and then, having spoken, turned his back and jogged away. There is a word for a man like that. You’ll find it in Chaucer.
The second try — let’s call it the knock-on for short — is being hotly debated by everyone from ex-professionals to students of motion and physics.
And Specsavers. ‘Who is Pascal Gauzere and why are hundreds of people trying to get him an emergency eye test with us?’ asked the company’s Twitter feed. Another meme had Gauzere getting his instructions from Ant and Dec as one of their Saturday Night Takeaway pranks. ‘OK Pascal, now tell them it’s a try…’
Yet, joking apart, by the end of the game England had made Gauzere’s performance almost irrelevant. Within four minutes of drawing level, Itoje conceded his fourth penalty of the game; two minutes later, Ellis Genge conceded another; six minutes after that, Dan Robson gifted a third.
England, from playing their best rugby of the tournament, were nine points adrift within 13 minutes. England have conceded 41 penalties in three Six Nations games. It is a ludicrous total.
It is not just Itoje’s leadership potential that is in question. How could Gatland make any England player his captain, given that level of indiscipline? Who is taking ownership of this?
We hear Farrell barking instructions during the match, but there is no sense of recrimination when the best efforts of the team are so carelessly undermined. A captain cannot guarantee levels of performance, but the onus for controlling discipline surely falls at his door.
That of the coach, too. Before the 2019 World Cup, during a training camp in Treviso, Eddie Jones refereed a 15-a-side match involving his squad. Apparently, he was ruthless about indiscipline. Any infringements he felt warranted a yellow card — and maybe a few on the borderline — were dealt with by dismissal.
The team continued with 14 players and the offender had to spend his time out doing strenuous exercises. Jones wanted to make a point about the consequences of indiscipline at the World Cup. It paid off.
England were one of only three countries not to have a single player successfully cited or shown a yellow or red card in Japan. So what happened? How did England make the journey to here? And how has Jones lost control of what is pretty much the same group? The circumstances of Gauzere’s performance won’t be forgotten, but are unlikely to be repeated. Unless England address their growing thoughtlessness, however, disappointments such as this will become only
too familiar.