Referees

[Cracker]

How long will we have to put up with refs like Pearson and Clancy who cost us games. Before anyone starts on how poorly the team is playing and whose fault it all is the basic fact is that the poor refs in the league cost teams matches and they seem to be accountable to no one. Something must be done to punish pathetic refs who can card players right left and centre and get no punishment themselves. Any comments?

[Rooster]

How long will we have to put up with refs like Pearson and Clancy who cost us games. Before anyone starts on how poorly the team is playing and whose fault it all is the basic fact is that the poor refs in the league cost teams matches and they seem to be accountable to no one. Something must be done to punish pathetic refs who can card players right left and centre and get no punishment themselves. Any comments?

Pearson is poor but Clancy is just biased

[Big Smoke Culchie]

How long will we have to put up with refs like Pearson and Clancy who cost us games. Before anyone starts on how poorly the team is playing and whose fault it all is the basic fact is that the poor refs in the league cost teams matches and they seem to be accountable to no one. Something must be done to punish pathetic refs who can card players right left and centre and get no punishment themselves. Any comments?

Pearson is poor but Clancy is just biased

Yep. Didn't want to be the first to say it, but he he's a dirty biased er

[Vitalstatistix]

Without a doubt the most one eyed refereeing performance i've seen in years. The forward pass for the try, the 4 pens against Big John - where do you even start??

Surely the League needs some form of monitoring system to punish referees in this situation. How are we meant to grow the popularity of the game when the game is decided by the referee rather than the teams?

Still seething 12 hours later....

[Snipe Watson]

Yes, yes and yes, but we lost the game through bad play. We should have been 20-25 up at half time, but we didn't play with control.

[Gazpacho]

Without a doubt the most one eyed refereeing performance i've seen in years. The forward pass for the try, the 4 pens against Big John - where do you even start??

Surely the League needs some form of monitoring system to punish referees in this situation. How are we meant to grow the popularity of the game when the game is decided by the referee rather than the teams?

Still seething 12 hours later....

What did you expect.
Remember he is turnip from Limerick. Conspiracy theories abound!

[Eggs]

It's not the point, these refereeing decisions are so obviously wrong, its crazy.

How long til some team decides to take legal action against a ref! Sounds ridiculous (and kind of is) but genuinely these unprofessional awful refereeing decisions are costing teams points which in turn costs them money in terms of qualification for further tournament stages etc.

If a bus driver makes a mistake and misjudges a corner, clips another car, no harm done. If on the other hand he is running red lights, he will lose his job.

Referees are professionals and as such the time needs to come when they are held accountable for their decisions. Instead coaches can't even speak up against blatant inadequacies as they will get punished for it!!

[Snipe Watson]

Can we adopt Nigel Owens as our pet referee and just bring him with us wherever we go?

[Cracker]

Have we the right to object to a referee allocated to us and who has clearly to all cost us games through either bias or being incompetent?

[ruckover]

Can we adopt Nigel Owens as our pet referee and just bring him with us wherever we go?

If only it were that easy

Add in whistle-happy Carlo Damasco from last week - he tried to cost us the bonus point at every possible opportunity.

Time for the league and ERC to get this sorted out. We have (possibly) been robbed of a home QF because of Blind Dave and how John Afoa can be collapsing every scrum against a lighter, younger and less experienced prop is beyond me. Ridiculous.

Have we the right to object to a referee allocated to us and who has clearly to all cost us games through either bias or being incompetent?

I think you can object, just not on those grounds doesn't show us in a good light if we're protesting against every ref we get though.

[gannonman]

Why couldn't Owens have refereed our match and Clancy the Leinster game. Would have saved travel expenses to! Any way he got it right at the breakdown. We were in from the side and off our feet all the time although missed it for Cardiff! Everywhere else he was gash.

[Vitalstatistix]

Clancy's clangars do highlight the fact that there does seem to be a real issue over the accountability of referees in both the Rabo and HEC. Given the importance of the referee in the modern game, there should surely be some independent monitoring/assessment going on so referees are taken to task where appropriate....

Quite sure UR won't rock the boat, especially with an IRFU ref

[darkside lightside]

Can someone do me a favour and go through Clancy's supposed clangers in the first half, and tell me what minutes they occurred at? Because I'm pretty damned sure they will all be for penalty offences. Aside from the first scrum that collapsed, it's ridiculous to penalise the very first scrum, rather than resetting.

The bottom line is that there have been a couple of big academic studies of reffing decisions, and guess what, home advantage does count - over the course of a season, we'll benefit from that as much as anyone. For example, go and look at Rooster's clip of Trimble's first try against Leicester - clear penalty number 1 Terblanche and Muller clear out ruck from 90 degrees side-on, clear penalty number 2 Wannenberg does exactly the same a few seconds later - so rather than going 7-0 up within 5 mins, we could well have been 0-3 down, if the ref hadn't ignored 2 clear penalties. And given how iconic that game has become in our recent memory, well, things could have been very different..

so I would say, f@#*ing suck it up when you catch a few tough calls from a ref, because rest assured you'll catch a few breaks as well through a season.

Bottom line - we lost last night because we were BAD and INDISCIPLINED and STUPID

[Rooster]

Can someone do me a favour and go through Clancy's supposed clangers in the first half, and tell me what minutes they occurred at? Because I'm pretty damned sure they will all be for penalty offences. Aside from the first scrum that collapsed, it's ridiculous to penalise the very first scrum, rather than resetting.

The bottom line is that there have been a couple of big academic studies of reffing decisions, and guess what, home advantage does count - over the course of a season, we'll benefit from that as much as anyone. For example, go and look at Rooster's clip of Trimble's first try against Leicester - clear penalty number 1 Terblanche and Muller clear out ruck from 90 degrees side-on, clear penalty number 2 Wannenberg does exactly the same a few seconds later - so rather than going 7-0 up within 5 mins, we could well have been 0-3 down, if the ref hadn't ignored 2 clear penalties. And given how iconic that game has become in our recent memory, well, things could have been very different..

so I would say, f@#*ing suck it up when you catch a few tough calls from a ref, because rest assured you'll catch a few breaks as well through a season.

Bottom line - we lost last night because we were BAD and INDISCIPLINED and STUPID

The difference in Poite though is he allows both sides away with things at the breakdown, thats not strictly correct but if a ref is letting both sides away with something or penaliseing both sides for the same then fine it is when he pings one side and not the other that problems occur and I think if you watch last nights match it is not what he nails Ulster for but what he fails to do to Cardiff for the same offence is the real problem.

[pg106]

I was at the match last night, Ruan in particular seemed to be getting very annoyed with Clancy's calls and JA just shook his head in disbelief. I don't think Cardiff got pinged at the scrum all night? It was a joke, waste of the 2 hour journey.