Must admit that watching live without the "benefit" of hearing the ref, or commentary, I wondered if I was being too harsh on the ref who I thought refereed one side only but when Rocky, always the voice of reason, says similar, I know I wasn't just being an aul grouch.rocky wrote: ↑Mon Nov 23, 2020 5:27 pm Firstly, I get totally drunk off whenever our opponents whinge and moan about how many players they are missing when we are often missing almost as many without mentioning that fact. Usually, if they say they are missing twenty players, 15 are from their academy and would never be selected for the first team. You rarely hear an Irish side complaining in this way,
Secondly, re the Treadwell issue, the TMO was right to pull the ref back from a red for a number of reasons:
The player had been tackled and was starting to come down.
Treadwell made a clear attempt to wrap his right arm.
All the impetus came from the Scarlets player, Treadwell appeared to actually be trying to back off from the collision.
So a yellow card was entirely sufficient, if even justified at all.
Thirdly, that was the most one-sided, almost incompetent,exhibition of how not to referee a match I've seen in a long time. They got away with failing to release and lying over the ball all match while we were penalised with alacrity if we did that.
In the build up to their final try, an Ulster player was picked up, turned upside down and dropped, completely missed by all the officials.
Their final try came from a maul that was stopped for about ten minutes, with the ref telling them to play the ball - should have been our scrum.
Why is a high tackle by one side just worth a penalty, while an almost identical tackle by the other side is worth a yellow card?
Finally, if the reffing was one-eyed, the commentary was a lot worse, you would have thought there was only one side playing (or playing well) for a lot of the match. In fairness to Shanklin, he did say the odd positive thing about Ulster but it was dreadful.
IMO, to win, given all that, with 14 men for 20 minutes, was a good performance - at least in patches, but it has to be admitted that our discipline was iffy at times. But it's hard to play if you expect to be penalised, whatever you do.
I agree with your observations 100% sir, and made similar observations at the time, but must admit I still expected Tredders to get red, and wasn't aware that it was the TMO who talked the ref into accepting mitigation.
mehr als möglich!!
