Law Discussion: Heineken Cup, Rd Three

There was a lot of excitement in Round Three of the Heineken Cup with some splendid rugby when, as the sun shone, there was greater emphasis on running with the ball than kicking it. There were also some refereeing aspects of interest.

We have given times in case anybody with a recording would like to see the action.

We shall start with a rarity from the Bath-Edinburgh thriller.

1. Time not yet up:

Bath led 16-9 but spent most of the last six minutes of the match in desperate defence of their line. It was trench warfare as Edinburgh battered and bashed, much of it under the Bath posts and somehow Bath kept them out.

Slowly for the defenders, too quickly for the attackers, the clock moved on till it reached the magic 80 minutes and went into the red.

No sooner had it clocked up 80 minutes, when, right on their line, Bath won a crucial turnover. Frantically they piled into the red-clad Scots to secure the ball. Scrumhalf Michael Claassen fished it out. He had options to end the game. The option he took was the wrong one and it did not end the game. From just inside the field of play Claassen sent a rocket of a pass back over the dead-ball line.

Immediately the referee penalised Claassen. In the heat of battle he could so easily have blown the final whistle. Instead his arm rose in penalty.

Why?

Law 10.2 (c) Throwing into touch. A player must not intentionally knock, place, push or throw the ball with his arm or hand into touch, touch-in-goal, or over the dead ball line.
Penalty: Penalty Kick on the 15-metre line if the offence is between the 15-metre line and the touchline, or, at the place of infringement if the offence occurred elsewhere in the field of play, or, 5 metres from the goal line and at least 15 metres from the touchline if the infringement occurred in in-goal.
A penalty try must be awarded if the offence prevents a try that would probably otherwise have been scored.

Admire the calm of the experienced referee. He penalised Bath again and then again for not being back and then he penalised Edinburgh and Bath kicked the ball out to win the match.

What options did Claassen have?

He could have kicked the ball back over the dead-ball line. He could have taken the ball back and grounded it over the goal-line. Those would have been safe options and clearly he wanted to a safe option. Kicking from there into the field of play or in search of a touch-line was a risky option. If he had – accidentally, of course – knocked on that, too, would have ended play.

It is hard to think of a worse option than the one he took.

79 minutes

2. The sudden penalty:

Play is going on. Nobody has done anything wrong and suddenly the referee blows his whistle. He penalises Edinburgh. Not only does he penalise Edinburgh but he sends Phil Godmin to the sin bin. Godmin was not near the ball and not near an opponent. But off he – eventually – went, staying around to argue the toss.

Godmin was guilty of dissent.

Is the referee entitled to do this?

Law 6.A.5 PLAYERS DISPUTING A REFEREE’S DECISION
All players must respect the authority of the referee. They must not dispute the referee’s decisions. They must stop playing at once when the referee blows the whistle except at a kick-off.
Penalty: Penalty Kick at the place of infringement or where play would next commence.

It also falls under foul play.

Law 10.4 (l) Acts contrary to good sportsmanship. A player must not do anything that is against the spirit of good sportsmanship in the playing enclosure.
Penalty: Penalty Kick

The referee had already spoken to the teams about dissenting “advice”. Accepting what the referee says is the rugby way. Referees are more often tolerant of “advice”, often under the guise of talking to their team-mates, often out of the mouths if scrumhalves, than they should or is good for the game.

Some will see this as petulance on the referee’s part. Some will say he is more concerned with his position than with the health of the players, taking greater action against words slung his way than against a late tackle and a high tackle.

The laws of a game are the soul of the game. On the field of play, the referee is the laws in action.

Law 6.A.4 (a) The referee is the sole judge of fact and of law during a match.

He is the law in action. Disrespect him and you disrespect the law, the soul of the game, the integrity of rugby football.

34 minutes

3. On the wrong side:

Edinburgh kicked the ball into touch. The rugby ball is oval and on landing it bounced back in touch towards the Edinburgh line.

Michael Claassen of Bath grabbed the ball and where he grabbed it wanted to throw it in.

The referee stopped him, saying: “He’s the wrong side of the touch judge. He must be on his side.”

The touch judge was standing at the place where the ball went out. Where Claasen grabbed the ball, it was a good five metres down the line towards the Edinburgh line. For a quick throw in he needed to be down the line towards his own line.

Law 19.2 (b) For a quick throw-in, the player may be anywhere outside the field of play between the place where the ball went into touch and the player’s goal line.

51 minutes

4. Stats: penalties & scrums:

a. The penalty count

The referee does not “give” penalties. He penalises an infringement. He is not dishing out Christmas presents on a “one for you, one for you” basis.

That said, there is seldom a huge discrepancy in penalty counts.

Here are some stats of penalties conceded from the weekend:

Ulster vs Stade Français: 13-9, where Ulster, the home side were penalised 13 times.
Scarlets vs Leinster: 11-15
Harlequins vs Sale Sharks: 7-11
Bath vs Edinburgh: 12-8

Home vs Away: 43-43.

Then there was the match between Munster and Perpignan at Thomond Park in Limerick, Munster’s home ground in a match when Perpignan scored three tries to nil and lost 24-23.

Munster vs Perpignan: 5-18.

That is a big discrepancy.

Some other figures with the same referee:

Wales vs Australia: 5-13
France vs South Africa: 5-14

Home vs Away: 15-45

That is a big discrepancy. This may of course be an accident of play, but it may be worth the referee’s while to think about it, lest a wrong perception grow.

b. Scrums

See how the scrums are doing at a time when they are under pressure. There is even a stat which says that scrums with their resets take 16% of the match time. Not that there are lot of scrums.

Munster vs Perpignan: scrums 15 – 3 resets, 3 collapses, 3 free kicks, 2 penalties (both in favour of Perpignan)
Ulster vs Stade Français: scrums 14 – 3 resets, 10 collapses, 4 free kicks, 5 penalties (four in favour of Ulster)
Scarlets vs Leinster: scrums 24 – 3 resets, 4 collapses, 0 free kicks, 0 penalties
Harlequins vs Sale: scrums 22 – 4 resets, 6 collapses, 1 free kick, 5 penalties (three in favour of Sale)
Bath vs Edinburgh: scrums 16 – 7 resets, 10 collapses, 5 free kicks, 3 penalties (two in favour of Edinburgh)

Bad in Belfast and Bath, better elsewhere, best at Parc y Scarlets.

Totals: scrums 91 – 20 resets, 33 collapses, 13 free kicks, 15 penalties.

Ignore collapses because often play goes on but of the 91 scrums, 48 had unnatural endings that required further action – 57%. That’s hardly desirable.

Of course, the onus is on the players to get it right. After all their health is at stake. And there is a problem for the players. If the laws are changed to depower the scrums to avoid this untidy state of affairs, they will change the physical requirements of players who play in the front row and again it would be a blow to the game as a game for all shapes and sizes.

5. The referee’s “mistake”:

Doug Howlett of Munster kicks high and chases. The ball descends to Farid Sid of Perpignan who does not catch the ball. It hits his face and rebounds forward where Perpignan’s Robins Tchale-Watchou bends and snaps up the ball. The referee penalises Tchale-Watchou.

The commentator, a former England international, disagrees when the replay shows clearly that the ball did not strike Sid’s hands but came off his face: “Off the face isn’t a knock-on and that is off the face. That’s actually a mistake by the referee. It’s a tough call but that’s not a penalty, is it?”

Now that he asks, it was a penalty. The referee did not make a mistake, but the commentator did.

At a knock-on there is the possibility of a penalty if the player in front who plays the ball robs the opponents of advantage. That option does not exist here. It is simple offside, the simplest of them all and the most ancient.

Law 11 DEFINITION

In general play a player is offside if the player is in front of a team-mate who is carrying the ball, or in front of a team-mate who last played the ball.
Offside means that a player is temporarily out of the game. Such players are liable to be penalised if they take part in the game.

Law 11.1 OFFSIDE IN GENERAL PLAY
(a) A player who is in an offside position is liable to penalty only if the player does one of three
things:
• Interferes with play or,
• Moves forward, towards the ball or
• Fails to comply with the 10-Metre Law (Law 11.4).
A player who is in an offside position is not automatically penalised.
A player who receives an unintentional throw forward is not offside.
A player can be offside in the in-goal.
(b) Offside and interfering with play. A player who is offside must not take part in the game.
This means the player must not play the ball or obstruct an opponent.

Tchale-Watchou was in front of Sid who had last played the ball. Tchale-Watchou played the ball. He was therefore penalisable.

It had nothing to do with a knock-on. The knock-on is a form of exception.

Law 11.7 OFFSIDE AFTER A KNOCK-ON
When a player knocks-on and an offside team-mate next plays the ball, the offside player is liable to penalty if playing the ball prevented an opponent from gaining an advantage.
Penalty: Penalty Kick

The two things must happen – the knock-on and then the deprivation of advantage.

The reasoning behind this is that the first infringement is the knock-on. If the offside player does not prevent the opponents from taking advantage, the knock-on counts.

In this particular incident, by the way, a case could be made for offside by Munster players for being within 10 metres of Sid and not retiring.

44/45 minutes

6. Taking out support:

The Scarlets throw into a line-out and leap high for the ball. Leo Cullen of Leinster does not jump for the ball but grabs Lou Reed, the Scarlets’ lock, who is supporting the jumper and pulls Reed to ground. This causes a general collapse. The referee penalises Cullen who seeks to debate the issue.

Clearly what Cullen did was dangerous play and tantamount to taking the jumper out in the air.

43 minutes

7. Dragging away:

Leo Cullen of Leinster goes high and wins the ball in the line-out. He does so beyond the 15-metre line. David Lyons, the Scarlets’ No.8, is clever and goes across the line-of-touch knowing that the line-out is over because the ball is thrown beyond the 15-metre line. He then moves in on Cullen.

A thing occurs with mainly Leinster players on the ground. It was probably not a ruck but a tackle had certainly occurred. Lyons was lying in the way of the ball and then big Dominic Day grabs Lyons around the ankles and drags him away, thus freeing up the ball for Martin Roberts.

OK?

Law 10.4 (f) Playing an opponent without the ball. Except in a scrum, ruck or maul, a player must not hold, or push, or charge into, or obstruct an opponent not carrying the ball.
Penalty: Penalty Kick

This was not in a scrum, ruck or maul. Day was not entitled to play Lyons.

Law 15.6 (h) After a tackle, any player lying on the ground must not prevent an opponent from getting possession of the ball.
Penalty: Penalty Kick

Lyons was not entitled to carry on lying where he was lying. His was the first infringement and deserved a penalty.

70 minutes

8. In or out?

Sale Sharks lead Harlequins 29-19 at The Stoop but Harlequins attack with might and main.

They manage to give David Strettle a bit of room on the right and he dashes for the corner as Ben Cohen and David Seymour of Sale try to stop him.

Strettle gets over in the corner but clearly does not ground the ball as the combined strengths of Cohen and Seymour turn him over.  Strettle has the ball under his right arm which is on Seymour while his left side is on Cohen. Cohen is partly in touch-in-goal.

The referee awards a five-metre scrum to Harlequins because Strettle was held up in in-goal.

Right?

Yes.

But he was lying on Cohen who was in touch-in-goal?

But Strettle does not touch touch-in-goal or the ground beyond it. He is not in touch. And what happens to the cornerpost these days is irrelevant.

9. Nitpicks:

We have here some tiny aspects of refereeing.

a. Slow wheel.

The referee penalised Harlequins for wheeling the Sale scrum at speed. He said: “I want the wheel slow and gradual. I don’t want it run around.”

Ignore the inference that the law is what the referee wants and just think of the wheel. Wheeling the scrum has always been allowed and still is allowed, but doing it at such speed as to cause the scrum to collapse – the so-called whip wheel – is dangerous and so is penalised. Doing “anything that is likely to collapse the scrum” is penalisable as dangerous play.

58 minutes

b. Hands down

Perpignan have a penalty and Jérôme Porical is to kick at goal. The referee says to a Munster player: “Put your hands down.”

Law 21.5 (c) If the kicker indicates to the referee the intent to kick at goal, the opposing team must stand still with their hands by their sides from the time the kicker starts to approach to kick until the ball is kicked.

“Hands by their sides.”

Somehow you would expect professional rugby players to know that!

21 minutes

c. At the dead-ball line

Ronan O’Gara kicks his fifth penalty goal for Munster and Gavin Hume kicks off for Perpignan. He kicks off far too far and the ball rolls into the Perpignan in-goal and is heading for the dead-ball line where O’Gara waits for it. Foot carefully placed behind the dead-ball line he snatches up the ball, which is just moving, and points back for the scrum.

What O’Gara did was so unnecessary. Once the ball went into the Munster in-goal from the kick-off, all O’Gara needed to do was ground the ball. That was enough to get the option of a scrum on the half-way line.

Law 13.9 BALL GOES INTO THE IN-GOAL
(a) If the ball is kicked into the in-goal without having touched or been touched by a player, the
opposing team has three choices:
To ground the ball, or
To make it dead, or
To play on.
(b) If the opposing team grounds the ball, or if they make it dead, or if the ball becomes dead by going into touch-in-goal or on or over the dead ball line, they have two choices:
To have a scrum formed at the centre, and they throw in the ball, or
To have the other team kick off again.
(c) If they opt to ground the ball or make it dead, they must do so without delay. Any other action with the ball by a defending player means the player has elected to play on.

You would expect an experienced player to know that!

47 minutes

d. Standing up

From a line-out Isa Nacewa of Leinster comes off his wing to take a short pass as Leinster go right, but the Scarlet’s scrumhalf Martin Roberts tackles him around the ankles. Nacewa gets free, stands up and passes to his right.

The referee penalises Nacewa.

Law 15.5 (b) A tackled player must immediately pass the ball or release it. That player must also get up or move away from it at once.
Penalty: Penalty Kick

Pass or release, not stand up and then pass.

The penalty kick was right – as Roberts knew and as one would have expected an experienced player to know.

26 minutes