I think Rory Best said it all when he said you need more than 9 points to beat the All Blacks and if you look at the possession and territory stats, O'Brien dropping the ball, Kearney not offloading when clean through etc we still had chances to win the game and didn't take them. I also think Rory made a mistake when he opted to kicked penalties when we were pressuring the All Blacks line and buckling their scrum. For me, those calls lacked a bit of courage.blues_fan wrote:Disappointing reaction from some Irish fans. Criticise a man's performance, challenge his decisions and competence, but it is absolutely appalling to not just question his integrity, but to stridently declare his integrity breached based on nothing more than what he does on the pitch. Peyper gave a massive penalty count, two yellow cards and World Rugby cited two ABs, yet it's still not enough to satisfy the bloodlust of some Irish fans. So if a referee doesn't see the match in exactly the same manner as your one eyed Irish opinion he's obviously on the take? Even some very poor examples in this this thread too, although not as bad as other venues for debate.
Reminds me of Ellie F-Sapolu calling Owens a racist merely because he was tough on Samoa, or the awful overreaction we had to Barnes in '07. A shame really.
I also think that while the ref was very poor, he got no help from his team of officials - the TMO call on the BB try is mind boggling. There is no way he clearly saw grounding.
I have to say, I think the All Blacks intimidate refs and they seem to test the resolve of officials in the first quarter and take their game plan from there. There is no question in my mind that the All Blacks deserved punishment for a range of both cynical and brutal offences. The Henshaw non-bound high tackle was appalling.
However, the nature of professional rugby is such that players will push it to the limit - I'd like to think that decent blokes wouldn't deliberately try to seriously injure players (though it does happen occasionally) but there will always be an element of cynicism in all teams, including Ireland (Stander's block in Chicago for example). In these instances it's really up to the officials to do their job. Refs have an unparalleled level of support for decision making and can take time to make those calls using video and there really is no excuse for poor decision making anymore and they need to fix that.