Unfair calls

The game is over and it’s a little more than 24 hours since the final whistle. It was a New Zealand ref who controlled yesterday’s French versus South African rugby game and some of the players are not happy with all of his decisions. It is a horrible feeling when one believes they have been hard done by. New Zealand has been in that same position in the past. There will always be scrutinisation of a loss but when one feels an incorrect call has been given, that makes any losing all the worse. Let’s face it, there is a lot at stake in games at this level.

I don’t know enough about rugby to know if the ref’s decision was a correct one, but it did seem similar to an incident in Saturday’s game when our player, Aaron Smith, was sent to the sin bin for ten minutes. In Sunday’s game, the French had the ball up their end and could have scored a try. A South African player appeared to interfere with the ball, which would have given the French a penalty. Instead, the decision went against them and the ball soon disappeared from their end.

There has been a lot of dialogue between the refs and the people upstairs monitoring the cameras in these World Cup games. This interaction seems to make decisions a whole lot fairer than in the past when there were no such aids. In Saturday’s game, the ref could be heard saying that he had lost communication. Someone was sent in to remedy the situation, indicating that refs have plenty of assistance. However, I am not sure what happened in this case and as I said above, whether the ref was correct in his call.

Watching games such as these last few, one can see so much of the psychological impact on players. Towards the end of the match, everyone is tired, yet a team only needs to score, to lift the spirits and give everyone a much-needed boost. It works conversely too. If each of the players in a team feels hard done by, it is difficult getting over that and hard to refocus. I am sure all players are trained for such eventualities, yet it must be extremely hard when they have given their all and see decisions not going their way. There is no psychological boost to find that extra bit in the tank.

But at the end of the day, this is life. Games are controlled by referees, and their decisions stand. Sometimes things work in our favour and at other times they work against us. We just have to trust that things balance out in the long run, though one does expect top level games of rugby to be exempt from controversial calls.