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Robbie Deans' bugbear sunk by refs' boss
- Wayne Smith
- From: The Australian
- November 24, 2010 12:00AM
INTERNATIONAL Rugby Board referee manager Paddy O'Brien insists senior referees have been told to rule on what is in front of them.
This countered Wallabies coach Robbie Deans' complaint that they are taking pre-conceived ideas into Tests.
Deans for months has been privately seething that other nations are exploiting the Wallabies' reputation for having a weak scrum to fool referees into awarding them penalties whenever anything goes amiss in the set piece.
But on Monday he finally broke his silence, publicly accusing referees of basing their scrum rulings on pre-conceived ideas.
O'Brien, while refusing yesterday to discuss the specifics of Deans' accusation, claimed that the issue of referees only ruling on what they could see had been addressed at their recent high performance meeting in London.
"I asked referees to referee each scrum on its merits," O'Brien told The Australian yesterday. "That was the message at Lensbury, to be accurate and consistent."
The Wallabies firmly believe their scrum is held up as a model of a weak set piece and that referees reinforce each other's low opinions of the Australian front-row.
But IRB sources have confirmed the Australian scrum has not been discussed by referees and that the Wallabies' fears are no more valid than South Africa's concerns that second-rower Bakkies Botha is on a referees' hit list or New Zealand's paranoia that referees always blame them for slowing down ruck ball.
The IRB at the Lensbury meeting trumpeted the fact that during the recent Tri-Nations series, the number of scrum resets had decreased by 40 per cent.
The flip side of that statistic, however, is that referees more frequently seem to be going directly to penalties whenever a scrum collapses.
That is a perfectly legitimate response if they are certain which side is responsible, but the Wallabies believe their opponents - and Deans specifically nominated the All Blacks - deliberately use trickery to take the scrum down, knowing the odds are that they will be awarded any penalty.
IRB sources have indicated referees will not be sanctioned if they reset a scrum a number of times if they are uncertain which side triggered the collapse.
But it was only a year ago that O'Brien himself criticised Australian referee Stuart Dickinson for getting the scrums "completely wrong" in the Italy-NZ Test in Milan when he set eight Italian scrums five metres out from the All Blacks line, repeatedly penalising NZ loosehead Neemia Tialata before sin-binning him.
In an extraordinary attack on one of his own referees, for which he later apologised, O'Brien said Dickinson had misread the scrums right from the outset and that it was not the NZ looseheads - Tialata or Wyatt Crockett - who were at fault but Italian tighthead Martin Castrogiovanni.
According to O'Brien, Castrogiovanni was boring in and that his technique in seven of the eight scrums on the NZ line was "purely illegal".
The IRB referees manager - himself a New Zealander - read Castrogiovanni's actions against the All Blacks exactly as the Wallabies did the Italian tighthead's scrummaging against them in Florence on Sunday.
The first four scrum penalties of the match all went against Australian loosehead James Slipper, just as they had gone against Crockett, despite clear evidence Castrogiovanni was boring in on hooker Stephen Moore.
It was only after captain Rocky Elsom pleaded with the referee, Frenchman Christophe Berdos, to watch Castrogiovanni's technique that the flood of scrum penalties to Italy slowed to a trickle.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news...-1225959780068
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