YOU BLEW IT!
Townsend hits out at ref over Fagerson red
SCOTLAND head coach Gregor Townsend believes referee Matt Carley was hasty with his decision to show a red card to Zander Fagerson in last night’s narrow defeat to Wales at BT Murrayfield.
The Scots surrendered a 17-3 lead against Wayne Pivac’s side to lose 25-24 in agonising fashion.
Townsend said that the English official hadn’t ‘had much of a discussion’ with his TMO Karl Dickson before sending Fagerson off, after the prop charged into the breakdown and made contact with the head of Welsh forward Wyn Jones.
It was a decision that turned the game the way of Wales with Scotland down to 14 men for most of the second half.
‘I didn’t think they had much of a
discussion and I didn’t think they showed enough of the angles with Zander,’ said Townsend.
‘They showed one slow-motion angle to begin with then took ages to find another one. The TMO did say that, because of the player’s late movement, you should make sure there’s no mitigation there, but I thought the whole process could have been much better.
‘It’s obviously very serious when someone gets a red card and it just felt that there wasn’t the right angles or a proper discussion. There was a discussion between the team of three when they were waiting for the angles, and they seemed to make their mind up then.
‘We get on with whatever decision the referee has made and there’s nothing we can do about it now.’
Townsend, when asked if he thought the TMO seemed more of a mind to recommend only a yellow card be given to Fagerson, replied: ‘It looked like the referee discussed that with his assistants when they were waiting for more angles.
‘It looked like it was played in slow motion on one angle rather than actually going: “was there late movement, was there a clear strike of the head?”
‘But they are part of the game, red cards. You have to deal with them.’
Townsend conceded his side’s indiscipline had cost them the game.
‘Ill-discipline would be the number one factor,’ he said. ‘When you go to 14 men for 25 minutes, it’s going to be more difficult. When you give away penalties that lead to points, that’s obviously not helping your chances of winning either.
‘Those two things we did during the game. We had a lot of opportunities, some of them we took, some of them led to penalties and some of them we felt could have led to more penalties with the pressure we had Wales under, especially at the beginning of the second half.
‘There were a couple of finishing issues for us like Scott Cummings and Gary Graham running the same line. With the pressure we had on them, that would have taken us well ahead but credit to Wales, when they had their chances, especially through their line-out maul and they scored points.
‘Overall, I felt we were in control defensively.
‘I really believed that we could still win. The effort and the skill the players showed in that last 10 minutes was outstanding to create a really good opportunity for Duhan van der Merwe at the end but it wasn’t enough.’