World Rugby should be in the dock alongside Erasmus

WE HAVE spent more time talking about Rassie Erasmus and his antics during the Lions tour of South Africa than we did about the series itself.

No surprise there. Rassie provided more entertainment in the space of a 62-minute video about refereeing inconsistencies than the players managed in 240 minutes – or was it 240 hours? – of meat-headed muscularity.

And we are talking about him still, thanks to the punishment handed down by World Rugby, a non-governing governing body so unused to doing anything about anything, they manage to make the probate dispute at the heart of “Bleak House” look like an open-and-shut case.

What on earth will the Springboks do without their director of rugby – sorry, Lord High Water Dispenser Pursuivant – disseminating tactical info on the quiet? Will we see Siya Kolisi and Handre Pollard scouring an empty field for guidance as a dying man crawls across the Kalahari in search of H2O?

It is not the business of this column to defend Erasmus, but it is worth pointing out that World Rugby itself has form in this area.

At the World Cup in 2015, the NGGB made life extremely uncomfortable for Craig Joubert, a South African referee no less, following a chaotic end to the Australia-Scotland quarter-final at Twickenham.

And at the last tournament in Japan, it criticised the standard of officiating in general after a run of dodgy calls in the opening round of pool matches.

With friends like that in high places, is it any wonder that the number of TMO referrals is rising faster than Sir Geoffrey Cox’s income?