Referees, TMO’s and their decisions

I have always been one of the guys protecting referees or should I say defending referees. They are human after all and do make mistakes. Over the last couple of weeks however some really bad calls were made involving TMO’s and referees alike.

The first instance was the Rory Arnold bite that wasn’t a bite. Now that got reversed after Arnold appealed his suspension. The TMO shoukd have in fact never ruled a red card and the tacklint and bitten player shoukd have been penalised for a grappling tackle.

Next came the Bismarck du Plessis fiasco. Piote’s decision was outright bad and I’m not going to go into that.

The Michael Rhodes stamping incident was next. In my view even the judicial officer got it wrong when he suspended Rhodes for one game. He made it cleat that Rhodes was falling with a player pulling him back. Now the day you have control over where your geet go when you fall and trip, then you can card a player for that. It was clearly accidental. Had the TMO and referee whatched that replay in real time they would have seen it.

The most outragous decision is however the yellow card Gerhard van der Heever received for punching. Whioe breaking one tackle, running an trying to fend off a tackle his hand makes contact with a player. Yes his fist was clenched. But last time I checked that is how you run.

Tue TMO points out the so called punch to the referee. They watch it again. The referee then has to ask the TMO what he is looking for. Again they only watch it in slow motion. Had they watched it in realtime it would tell a different story. Funny thing is the player only gets a yellow card. If it was indeed a punh it should have been a straight red. Punching is foul play lats time I checked.

All these decisions had TMO’s involved and they screwed it up even more so than the referees. The Piote decision being the exception on the rule here.

So in the end even with technology we are gettinf it wrong and it is costing teams and players.