Respected former referee Nigel Owens has hit out at Rassie Erasmus after the SA director of rugby’s latest criticism of match officiating on social media.
In the aftermath of the clash between the Springboks and France, Erasmus posted a spate of videos of officiating discrepancies by match referee Wayne Barnes, and week after a similar post following a loss for the world champions to Ireland.
The World Cup-winning coach then responded to the outcry over his clips, asking those who disagreed with his social media content to stop following him.
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Speaking on The Telegraph’s ‘Rugby Podcast’, Owens believes that Erasmus – who has already served a ban by World Rugby for such behaviour – is going about matters all wrong.
“I saw these [videos] come up and I was thinking ‘is this his genuine profile? Is he doing this?’” said Owens.
“To me, we don’t need that in the game and I’d have thought he’d have learned his lesson by now, if it is him doing this. There’s a procedure in place.
“If you’re not happy about decisions, or you have questions about decisions – as every coach would have – referees can’t get everything right, there is a process to go through.
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“You send your timeline to the referee manager, which would be Joel Jutge at World Rugby, and they would look at that with the referee.
“Then they would reply to the coach and say: ‘Yeah, this could have been penalised’ or ‘the referee is correct here’. Or, like a lot of things in rugby, it’s: ‘This is a grey one. This is what the referee feels and it’s his interpretation of it [but] it could well have gone the other way’. That’s the nature of the game.
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“Once you start putting things out there on social media questioning decisions, that’s not what this game is about, I don’t think. I don’t think this it’s right and I don’t like it.
“Go through the proper channels, and as long as everyone is open and honest and transparent… that is the way forward, not [to do it] on social media.”
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Photo: Jordan Mansfield/World Rugby via Getty Images/World Rugby
