05:11
rugbyunion, United Rugby Championship
After a week of horrendous refereeing in the Rugby Championship we get treated the weekend with even more horrendous refereeing in the URC. Everybody knows by know how low the URC has set standards for officiating but what I saw in the Lions vs Bulls game was just horrendous. The amount of times AJ Jacobs made blind calls when he had no vision of what happened, was ridiculous. He was penalizing the Lions for stuff that didn't happen and that he didn't see. He was simply guessing most of the time and those guesses went against the Lions for some reason. You would think the home team would get the benefit of the doubt when it's 50/50 calls but not to AJ Jacobs, he just went with his gut and didn't use his eyes. The best had to be the opening minutes when the Bulls takes a quick tap with Marcell Coetzee, he goes over the line but there is bodies everywhere around him. The ref is jumping around clearly trying to see the ball but he's struggling because there's a lot of bodies. Then he asks the Lions players to get up, and after they get up, he then sees grounding. How the hell can you use that as evidence for grounding after it was 20 seconds after he blew his whistle? Of course he's going to see grounding if the Lions players stand up, you can't use that as evidence for what happened 20 seconds ago. Then the following incident where Simelane takes the ball up, and he gets tackled and held up by Henco van Wyk. Before Simelane's knees touch the ground, the ref shouts 3 times for the Lions tacklers to release. Throughout that time when he shouted tackler release, Simelane was held up with no knee touching the ground. So AJ Jacobs, again made a blind call when he had no vision because Simelane's knees was nowhere near the ground. He took another guess and it cost the Lions. Then there was the scrums, where he penalizes the Lions for doing something and directly afterwards the Bulls do the exact same thing, but the ref says Lions must play the ball. So where is the consistency?
2022-09-17
dige-nEF59I
