I hate referee bashing but come on ...
THE next time the Springboks play Ireland will be in a pool match at France ’23 and if they win, and indeed go on to win the World Cup, no South African will care what happened last weekend in Dublin.
But for now, it hurts that the Boks really should have nailed this one and avenged that 38-3 humiliation at the same ground five years ago.
The Boks lost because of two reasons: They made the schoolboy error of going into an inevitably tense Test match without a recognised goal-kicker, and they were on the wrong side of poor officiating.
I hate referee-bashing because it is so easy, and so common, and often the match official is the soft target for enraged fans too oneeyed to comprehend that they are usually being equally poor for both teams.
Fans don’t criticise the referee when their team has won and, honestly, surely nobody believes refs go out to deliberately cheat.
My big beef with officiating is that World Rugby puts the whistle in the mouth of the wrong guys too often and does not penalise them when they get it wrong. Actually, why would they? World Rugby is not big on admitting its errors ...
The players get dropped when making mistakes too often, but refs just carry on regardless. And my worst is the TMOs, who are basically failed referees.
This year alone I can’t tell you how many TMOs have got decisions wrong, despite sitting in what looks like a Nasa control room, and after taking an eternity to look at endless camera angles, they still can’t see that a pass was forward.
Mostly, they just agree with the ref’s “on-field decision”. They hardly ever overturn the ref and cop out with, ‘I can’t see any clear and obvious reason why the try should be allowed/disallowed”.
They just don’t have the clout to make big calls. You can go and walk the dog during the time they take to make their non-decisions, so why do we have them?
At the Aviva Stadium in Dublin on Saturday night, both Irish tries contained a forward pass in the build-up, and the Johnny Sexton one, in particular, was a shocker.
We have to assume that the TMOs utilised by World Rugby for big Test matches are the cream of their crop and have gone through rigorous examinations. Good grief, imagine what their worst TMOs must be like?!
Despite not having a kicker at the Aviva Stadium and not having a competent official in sight, the Boks finished just three points short of the Irish. The pain of the defeat has clouded the fact that they played pretty well.
Ireland Andy Farrell doesn’t do flattery, so when he called the Boks “a hell of a team”, he meant it.
And the long injury list the Irish had on Sunday illustrated how the Boks gave it a full go.
The forwards truly did not deserve to have their efforts go unrewarded by awful goal-kicking.
And finally, a plea to World Rugby: Don’t put a 28-year-old inexperienced Georgian in charge of a major Test match.