Rugby Championship

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Couldn't see a thread.

Must say its quite good in a weird way to see Hooper being very honest on his reasoning to pull out of the match. Talking about mental health slowly getting there.

I'm going to go rogue and pick 2 away victories today. Watch South Africa win by 50 now.

Marika Koroibete has to be in the conversation for world player of the year this year, what a beast. Or Korinbete as the Aussie commentator Sean Moloney pronounces it.

Collapse2005 wrote:Marika Koroibete has to be in the conversation for world player of the year this year, what a beast. Or Korinbete as the Aussie commentator Sean Moloney pronounces it.

As a Fijian that's how it should be pronounced apparently

Strange one that on Swain - not quite sure what he was trying to do, was certainly reckless and it looked to have caused a serious injury, but not often you see a card for someone going too low!

RDW wrote:

Collapse2005 wrote:Marika Koroibete has to be in the conversation for world player of the year this year, what a beast. Or Korinbete as the Aussie commentator Sean Moloney pronounces it.

As a Fijian that's how it should be pronounced apparently

10-10 probably a fair HT score. ABs had a lightning start but the Wallabies crawled their way back in. Not sure how the ABs failed to score with 2 man advantage!

Jake Gordon took an absolute age with the ball playable at the back of the ruck - then AB counter ruck and try.

What was he thinking!

Strange yellow on Gordon - don't think you can say he actively collapsed the maul there.

Australia's discipline is killing them - NZ exploiting all the space.

A bit harsh alright, Australia are going to get thrashed now. Bledisloe gone again for another year.

Pen probably the right call as it was low danger, but he still lifted  over the horizontal which I thought was minimum yellow? Ref maybe not wanting to add to the growing pile of cards.

Wallabies lineout letting them down in key parts of the field

Foley has had a great game, particularly given he's not played international rugby in 3 years, and hasn't played a game in months!

Collapse2005 wrote:A bit harsh alright, Australia are going to get thrashed now. Bledisloe gone again for another year.

Might have spoke a bit too soon

What a game!

Draw would probably be fair

Wow, he really did whiplash those cowboy legs to get it over

What a comeback!

Wtf has the ref done here

Absolute shocker of a call

Watching at work with the sound off, what's that last call about?

Wallabies get a penalty on their line. Ref calls time on. Foley takes a bit of time to kick it and as he's in the motion of kicking the ref calls an AB scrum for time wasting.

He's given the ABs the game!

Thats a very contraversial win

Foley didn't seem to be taking any longer than players usually do to clear their lines. Did he give any warning?

Poorfour wrote:Foley didn't seem to be taking any longer than players usually do to clear their lines. Did he give any warning?

Not that I could hear.

That was a truly abysmal call from a ref. We talk about refs having a feel for the game and that was very much the opposite of that!

A great game ruined by more incompetent officiating, this is why rugby union is fast becoming unwatchable. Close games in rugby union are almost always decided by the referee, not the players, and that presents a real problem.

Third Aussie YC wasn't a yellow. NZ dodged a clear yellow (minimum) for the tip tackle and release. Then that nonsense right at the end. The initial NZ pen from the restart wasn't a pen. Then Foley did nothing wrong.

Shades of the England v Wales game a couple of years back where Wales were allowed to take a quick pen after Farrell had been told to talk to his team.

It's a shocker when a ref loses all feel for the game.

Sounds like the ref had said to Foley to get on with it but

A - I bet there were numerous penalty kicks to touch all game where the kicker took longer. Why only do it for that kick? It's not like he time wasted to get over the 80 - there was alway a phase left.

And

B) - when have you ever, ever seen that given 5m from the defending line with 1 minute left after a major turnover at the death

Just looked at the replay - there was 9s between the ref saying time on and him awarding the scrum. Foley has already started his kick by then

Poorfour wrote:Shades of the England v Wales game a couple of years back where Wales were allowed to take a quick pen after Farrell had been told to talk to his team.

It's a shocker when a ref loses all feel for the game.

What are you talking about... there was nothing wrong with that one .

I'm mixed on that call, because it would have been great to see Australia win, and yet I couldn't understand why Foley was ignoring what Raynal was clearly telling him.

It doesn't matter how the referee officiated other kicks during the game. When the score is close, and there isn't time on the clock, it's not uncommon for referees to warn teams about timewasting.

Whether Raynal was right to insist on play restarting quickly, it just seems like Foley completely misread his instructions. Australian players closest to Raynal seemed to realize the risk, and tried to warn him, but he was looking in the other direction.

People are upset that Raynal blew just as Foley was about to kick. It looked more like Foley had carried on talking to teamates off to his left, rather than shaping to kick, and that was too much for Raynal.

Galted wrote:

Duty281 wrote:

Galted wrote:There are rugby league matches over the weekend which are clearly more important to Aussies.

Don't blame 'em, I prefer rugby league these days.

This country's fallen apart since the queen's demise.

Until the King puts me back on the straight and narrow, a great weekend of rugby league coming up in both the north and south. Games decided by players, not referees.

Games are never decided by refs.

Quite like this angle of the final pen as Foley wastes time and gets pinged. https://twitter.com/berniecoen/status/1570381819144712193?t=9LIr1aiYNZzseJFFHuLsPQ&s=19

To reiterate I'm never 1 to say refs don't make mistakes simply that the players always have more influence. And to back that up Swain was very lucky not to see red.

RDW wrote:Sounds like the ref had said to Foley to get on with it but

A - I bet there were numerous penalty kicks to touch all game where the kicker took longer. Why only do it for that kick? It's not like he time wasted to get over the 80 - there was alway a phase left.

And

B) - when have you ever, ever seen that given 5m from the defending line with 1 minute left after a major turnover at the death

In over 40 years of Rugby, I have never seen that pen called in the arse end of a game. That said, if the ref was clearly telling him to kick the ball, as his teammates clearly understood, then there is no excuse for not kicking.

Based on the social media reaction most people seem to agree that this was a poor decision. There are still a lot of people saying 'the ref told him to kick it, he should have kicked it'.

To me this completely misses the point of why this situation was so poorly handled by the ref, and why it is such an unsatisfactory outcome for the sport.

By the letter of the law the ref was correct to give a scrum there, but the fundamental issue is that he would have ignored 1000 incidents throughout the game that - by the letter of the law - should have resulted in his intervention. Take scrum feeds as an analogy - imagine if the ABs had knocked on instead and during the Wallabies scrum he gave the ABs a free kick for squint feed? Completely correct by the letter of the law but every single scrum feed all game was squint.

I'm sure someone on social media will do this, but you can guarantee most penalty kicks all game took longer than the one at the end. By the time the captain and team have a little huddle to decide what to do, 10 finally finds the ball and then prepares himself to kick you're probably looking at twice the tome Foley took.

So why only do it for that one?

In terms of precedent too, there are countless games of rugby where teams run down the clock at the end. The answer is for the ref to call time off and keep time off until the team actually does something. Not to fundamentally alter the course of the game because of it. Similarly there are other times during a game when teams run down the clock - before half time, or when they're under the pump and need a rest so take their time walking to lineouts or takiing kicks to touch etc.

Rugby is certainly going through an identify crisis just now and certainly in Australia struggling to stay relevant - trying to explain why this happened to a non-rugby fan really emphasises the problems in rugby right now.

Did Australia deserve to lose because Foley took 9s to kick the ball into touch, given the lineout and next phases of play would still happen regardless of how long he took? I struggle as a sports fan to understand how you can say yes to that.

Also worth saying that Ian Foster's pile on after the game was pretty disappointing. You can 100% guarantee if the roles were reversed he'd be absolutely livid like Rennie was.

What goes around tends to come around in sport - I look forward to him being so magnanimous when the ABs lose to a last minute controversial decision in the future

RDW wrote:In terms of precedent too, there are countless games of rugby where teams run down the clock at the end. The answer is for the ref to call time off and keep time off until the team actually does something. Not to fundamentally alter the course of the game because of it.

That's an important point to make. My initial reaction to the incident was identical to Foley's teamates. It was clear Raynal was getting irritated, so it made no sense for Foley to ignore him. It's the same as when a referee wrongly says "hands away" or "use it".  While the player might feel right is on his side, it's dumb rugby to ignore the referee's instructions.

As you say, though, there were other ways to handle that incident. The resulting scrum decision was a huge change in the fortunes of the sides, and something Raynal ought to have considered. Foley wasn't deliberately trying to push the referee's buttons, to see how much he could get away with. In the post-match interview, Dave Rennie suggested Foley thought the time off/time back on exchange had reset the situation, when it was actually a final warning. Raynal could have been clearer to the team that he was preparing to go nuclear.

RDW wrote:Based on the social media reaction most people seem to agree that this was a poor decision. There are still a lot of people saying 'the ref told him to kick it, he should have kicked it'.

To me this completely misses the point of why this situation was so poorly handled by the ref, and why it is such an unsatisfactory outcome for the sport.

By the letter of the law the ref was correct to give a scrum there, but the fundamental issue is that he would have ignored 1000 incidents throughout the game that - by the letter of the law - should have resulted in his intervention. Take scrum feeds as an analogy - imagine if the ABs had knocked on instead and during the Wallabies scrum he gave the ABs a free kick for squint feed? Completely correct by the letter of the law but every single scrum feed all game was squint.

I'm sure someone on social media will do this, but you can guarantee most penalty kicks all game took longer than the one at the end. By the time the captain and team have a little huddle to decide what to do, 10 finally finds the ball and then prepares himself to kick you're probably looking at twice the tome Foley took.

So why only do it for that one?

In terms of precedent too, there are countless games of rugby where teams run down the clock at the end. The answer is for the ref to call time off and keep time off until the team actually does something. Not to fundamentally alter the course of the game because of it. Similarly there are other times during a game when teams run down the clock - before half time, or when they're under the pump and need a rest so take their time walking to lineouts or takiing kicks to touch etc.

Rugby is certainly going through an identify crisis just now and certainly in Australia struggling to stay relevant - trying to explain why this happened to a non-rugby fan really emphasises the problems in rugby right now.

Did Australia deserve to lose because Foley took 9s to kick the ball into touch, given the lineout and next phases of play would still happen regardless of how long he took? I struggle as a sports fan to understand how you can say yes to that.

You're ignoring the 30 seconds they'd already had on this though RDW. Watch the section again, far longer than 9 seconds.

Swain has been cited.

If you watch the full replay, the penalty is awarded at 78:25....after 30 seconds of no kick, and three warnings to Foley to kick the ball, the ref calls time-off and instructs Foley once more to kick. The ref then calls time on, and 9 seconds later, with still no kick, the ref blows for time wasting...(even Foley's team mates were shouting at him to kick)...so, was it a harsh call? At what point do you blow the whistle for time wasting? 39 seconds? one minute? five minutes? 10 minutes?

This would never have happened under an Elizabethan reign.

Mr Fishpaste wrote:If you watch the full replay, the penalty is awarded at 78:25....after 30 seconds of no kick, and three warnings to Foley to kick the ball, the ref calls time-off and instructs Foley once more to kick. The ref then calls time on, and 9 seconds later, with still no kick, the ref blows for time wasting...(even Foley's team mates were shouting at him to kick)...so, was it a harsh call? At what point do you blow the whistle for time wasting? 39 seconds? one minute? five minutes? 10 minutes?

Thanks - that's useful context. The decision looks much more justified given that - and he did explain to Slipper that he'd told them repeatedly to do it.

Raynal, French ref... say no more.

Mark from Two cents rugby has revisited this decision.

He thinks, if Raynal was going to go nuclear, he needed to be clearer with the words he was using with Foley. He compares it with telling his kids to finish their dinner (Raynal saying "We play") and telling them to finish or they won't get dinner (Raynal saying "Play now, or I'll penalize you").

I have a lot of sympathy with that opinion but it would make more sense if English was Raynal's first language. As it isn't, then you can't expect him to say things the way a native speaker would, and the onus is as much on the players as the referee to communicate.

I've watched matches with Australia referee Angus Gardner, where the communication breakdown is down to his use of colloquial English with non-English speaking teams. Gardner never gets flack for that, so I'm not sure Raynal should get it for not having the right emphasis.

I do give a lot of the blame to Foley, because he was best positioned to take the temperature of the moment. If his teammate, standing further away, could understand what was happening, then he should have too. Foley said later that he though time was still off, but that makes no sense, because he shaped to kick, which he wouldn't have done if he didn't know time was back on.

However, in the end, I think the decision to award New Zealand a scrum in that position, at that point in the game, was a vastly disproportionate penalty for the offence Foley committed. If Raynal wanted to escalate the problem, he could have notified the captain after he called time off. With ninety seconds or so to go, the biggest time-wasting opportunity would have been the walk to the line-out, and discussion about calls.

A couple of things on Reynal's decision:
1 - When you watch the full sequence, from the penalty being awarded, Foley is clearly messing about. Was about 20 seconds before the ref calls time off and speaks to Foley about getting a move on. Time back on and Foley still does not make the kick without delay. You can see the centre going apesh1t next to him, knowing he's pushing his luck.

2 - I've seen a breakdown that suggested for other penalty kicks to touch, NZ typically took between 15 and 20 seconds, Australia between about 20 and 30 seconds other than this last instance, which was something like 40 seconds on the clock plus 10 seconds with the clock stopped . Aus had previously been spoken to about the time they were taking.

3 - The Law says penalties should be taken 'without delay', but doesn't specify a time in seconds.

Overall, I think the decision is justified to the letter of the Law, but it was an unusual time to apply it.

I initially watched the game at work with the sound off as I was on a call, but the more I've seen of the buildup to the call, the more I tend to side with Raynal. He told Foley to play with the clock on, stopped the clock, told him to play, put the clock back on and when he still didn't take the kick, Raynal blew.

Even if Foley hadn't correctly heard the calls, his team mates clearly had and didn't convey it to him. Raynal behaved very appropriately and would have had a case for reversing the penalty. It's a shame to see the game decided that way, but all the Aussies had to do was kick the ball off the park rather than mess around.

I think it's interesting that Foley is still publicly at least pretending that it wasn't his fault. He was just trying to get it really clear what was going to happen at the next lineout apparently. I'm not a rugby tactician but I would be surprised if it were anything other than catch it at the front, hold it until 80 mins and kick it out.

No 7&1/2 wrote:I think it's interesting that Foley is still publicly at least pretending that it wasn't his fault. He was just trying to get it really clear what was going to happen at the next lineout apparently. I'm not a rugby tactician but I would be surprised if it were anything other than catch it at the front, hold it until 80 mins and kick it out.

But why does that hold up the kick to touch? Can discuss the lineout options once the ball is out of play. Hell, he might even have missed touch (although unlikely since there was no need to go for a long clearance, just get it off the park around the 10m line...)

dummy_half wrote:

No 7&1/2 wrote:I think it's interesting that Foley is still publicly at least pretending that it wasn't his fault. He was just trying to get it really clear what was going to happen at the next lineout apparently. I'm not a rugby tactician but I would be surprised if it were anything other than catch it at the front, hold it until 80 mins and kick it out.

But why does that hold up the kick to touch? Can discuss the lineout options once the ball is out of play. Hell, he might even have missed touch (although unlikely since there was no need to go for a long clearance, just get it off the park around the 10m line...)

I agree, they could waste more time walking to the lineout than they'd get away with by delaying the kick.

Oh I just lifted his wording. I think he was consistently time wasting following the award of the pen and is merely making excuses and pretending he hasn't monumentally effed it up.

Foley pushed his luck to breaking point and got punished

Story end of

No excuses

Oakdene wrote:

dummy_half wrote:

No 7&1/2 wrote:I think it's interesting that Foley is still publicly at least pretending that it wasn't his fault. He was just trying to get it really clear what was going to happen at the next lineout apparently. I'm not a rugby tactician but I would be surprised if it were anything other than catch it at the front, hold it until 80 mins and kick it out.

But why does that hold up the kick to touch? Can discuss the lineout options once the ball is out of play. Hell, he might even have missed touch (although unlikely since there was no need to go for a long clearance, just get it off the park around the 10m line...)

I agree, they could waste more time walking to the lineout than they'd get away with by delaying the kick.

Just as they've formed up the prop suddenly needs to do up his boot lace. On both boots.

6 week ban for Swain, richly deserved.