The Most Hated Man in South Africa

The weekend's rugby championship match between New Zealand and the Springboks was ruined by one man, Romain Poite. A game which was touted to be one of the highlights of the season seized to be so when Bismarck du Plessis was given a yellow card early for a so called late, no arms and high tackle. However, looking at the replays it is clearly seen to be none of these.

Romain Poite is a French international referee with a fair share of experience, having reffed international games since 2010. He has however come under fire for his performances in recent times after he was appointed to referee the third and deciding Test of the 2013 British & Irish Lions tour against Australia. The Lions won, with Poite's rulings at the scrum being pivotal to their success.

This was once again the case in this weekend’s game where he made a few controversial decisions which changed the course of the match, and ruined a game which promised to be an epic clash between the two top ranking nations in rugby union.

Poite made numerous errors during the match, but the two that infuriated South African fans most was the yellow card handed to Bismarck for the so called high, late and no arms tackle and then the second yellow for leading with the elbow, which lead to a red card. This meant that the Boks had to play 50 minutes of the game with just 14 men.

If we had to look at the first infringement (Bismarck’s tackle) there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. First of all, Du Plessis was not offside, there had been no ruck or maul so there is no offside line as it was open play. Secondly, Carter had the ball when he was tackled, so there is no way that it could have been late. Thirdly, the tackle was at chest height, and could therefore not be a high tackle. Lastly Bismarck’s arm was wrapped around Carters back and arms were clearly used, thereby ruling out his third so called infringement that Poite gave for giving the yellow card.

What made the decision worse is that he had gone to the TMO and asked for a review of the scuffle that ensued after the tackle and could clearly see that he had made a mistake on the big screen. He also had two assistant referees on the side of the field and a TMO in the stand who could all have corrected him. The French TMO George Ayoub's also played a role in this incident, when clearly seeing what had happened after reviewing the pushing and shoving that happened after the tackle, he informed Poite “You decide what to do as far the tackle goes.” Had he corrected him, South Africa could very well have won the game, which ended pretty close despite playing with only 14 men.

The second incident might well have been a yellow card, however had that 1st decision not gone against the Boks, they would not have been awarded a red card, and would therefore only have played with a man short for 10 minutes, which is a lot easier to handle than the 50 minutes that they had to endure.

The 50 minutes ended up being too much to handle for South Africa and they eventually lost the match 29-15. Romain Poite has admitted he made a mistake in yellow carding du Plessis as well as the IRB. The IRB gave the excuse of human error as the reason for the error, but with the systems place today this sort of thing should not have happened.
South African Fans showed their disgust by forming a Facebook petition to stop Poite from ever reffing another rugby game. At the time of writing this blog there were 63 000 likes for the page and 86 000 people talking about the page. There is also a video of Poite being tackled and pushed around on the field that has made the rounds which seemed lessen the hate South Africans felt for him and brought a smile to their face. Have a look at the video below; I’m sure you’ll enjoy it as much as I did!