Thanks for the fair assessement
I still think the free for all in the ruck was massively advantaging SA with its heavy and slower forward pack, BOK was authorising the boks to slow down the quick game of the french which was their obvious central strategy. The not called video review on the interception is massive at that moment, France is on a high, plays perfectly its fast paced strategy, they just scored a try playing fast, clearly that was the winning strategy to counter the heavy forward boks pack and we could have been at 14-0 against 14, nobody will ever know but from there, no try on high kick ball following the etzebeth interception and a possible 20 to 7 at half time, it makes a massive difference in my opinion.
So I will tell you frankly: we got purely and simply robbed yesterday, like your feeling about Bryce Lawrence in 2011. This is the clear feeling I have today, BOK did not want us to win that match yesterday, I cannot think any other ways seeing the different evidences and the way it was reffed. Why ? great question. I think first that the saffies played the referee victim in the build up week and it partially worked, BOK reffed in an advantageous way for SA like I just explained, the french could not adapt to that sort of game, they did not have the weapons for that but also thats not how you play most match of rugby nowadays, there are clear ruck rules and they were through the windows yesterday. Just saying "you have to adapt to teh referee, even if the referee is asking you to play football instead of rugby", it cannot work like this. And more largely, I also think that unfortunately, even if we have milked it a bit more in the last 10 years, we are behind the anglo-saxon teams in terms of our relations with World rugby, no french on the board, this board who is in charge of all match officials for example, BOK answers to this board and only to this board, he knows he will never have consequences if he has a bad match towards the french. If he has a bad match towards the saffies, there could be more consequences, he could be under pressure for the rugby championship and other southern competitions.
I know it all sounds conspiracy but at the end of the day, it is not, it is just human behaviour, pressure put before match, individual interests for later, a multitude of small things turning a ref on a night a one sided one. I do no think BOK has an anti-french bias, I think he has his own interest at heart rather simply. But at the end of the day, I do not really know what drove him to ref the match this way, to refuse to call for video refering on 2 important occasions where there were clear cases to do so and let the boks rule the rucks how they wanted
It was good to hear Dupont starting to open it yesterday in press conference, very rare and that was refreshing. I do not agree with all the ones who are accepting the fate of a badly reffed match, the other way around, I think we need to shout loudly, refs must be held accountable, there is too muhc at stake, I'm not too much aware if refs have reviews with World rugby about their matches, I hope they have. My feeling is that there is only a small numbers of refs who reach the international level and it looks like once they are there, they are not dismissable, they can do almsot as they please ..but possibly I'm wrong, I do not know the process
