FLAWED LAWS MUST CHANGE

SO, World Rugby have said Craig Joubert got the big decision wrong and should have given a scrum to Australia instead of the fateful penalty. The right decision has been made — but 24 hours too late for Scotland. When I watched it live, my gut feeling of playing and watching games for over 30 years was accidental offside, never a penalty. A penalty should only be awarded if the referee is absolutely certain that an offence has taken place. There was no way Joubert could be certain the ball had intentionally been played by a Scottish player before Jon Welsh caught the ball. Technically, he was not allowed to go to the TMO because they are only to be used to adjudicate on foul play or the act of scoring a try — but common sense should have prevailed. What if Joubert had got the two captains together and said, due to the significance of the decision with only a minute left and Australia only two points down, he was going to use the TMO to make the right call? It was the sensible option. If he would have done this, he would have seen how difficult it was to see definitively who had touched the ball last and awarded a scrum. If he had done this, not one person, and I include all Australians, would have objected because the right decision would clearly have been made. We know that the decision was wrong but it doesn’t change the fact that Scotland are out of the World Cup. If the correct decision had been made, who is to say that Australia would not have found a way to score a try, penalty or a drop goal to win the game anyway. If they had, I would still have been gutted but not aggrieved as I am after what happened. You want to win or lose fairly, not like this. It makes me angry. What angers me is that we had the technology to clarify this situation and we didn’t use it because the law did not allow it. Common sense and technology must allow the correct calls to be made and not put referees like Craig Joubert in the position that he is now in. He is a decent man who made the wrong call — but the system didn’t help him, which is wrong.