Hand outstretched, palm up, Izaia Perese leapt into the air for an attempted intercept which would have seen him charging downfield for a potential try. Instead, the ball bounced off his fingertips and moments later he was sent to the sinbin.
“Clear, deliberate knock-on… yellow card,” referee Andrew Brace said after TMO Joy Neville forced a replay of the event.
Immediately the Channel 9 commentary team were questioning the decision, social media lit up, a 46,000 strong crowd was left fuming while Perese and his teammates could only shake their heads as they went down a player just 20-minutes into the clash.
“This is the absurdity that we’re seeing at the moment, there’s just no common sense applied to some of the rulings,” former All Black and Stan Sport commentator Andrew Mehrtens said.
“That’s not clear and deliberate. I absolutely take issue with this.”
The most contentious rule in rugby yet again sprung forth to rear its ugly head, not once but twice with England’s Marcus Smith sent to the naughty chair for flinging a lazy hand out in the 53rd minute, to mar an exhilarating clash that at times turned into a laborious, thumb-twiddle as the TMO continually made their presence felt.
While World Rugby continues to grapple with managing head contact and concussions leaving many fans divided over the current card system (the All Blacks-Ireland game featured four cards alone), the deliberate knock-down law has managed to unite rugby watchers, from players, to referees and fans around the world as they bemoan the stupidity behind the law.
Basking in his team’s solid 25-17 win, Eddie Jones added to the debate, saying what punters around the world were thinking and sounded off on the current laws.
“They [Perese and Smith] went for intercepts. It doesn’t make any sense,” Jones said. “Whenever you’re reaching for a ball, your hand’s open. If you’re going like that knocking the ball down, that’s the deliberate knock on and that should be penalized. But that’s not the actions we saw today.
Izaia Perese is sent to the bin for this alleged deliberate knock-on.
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“We saw in the New Zealand-Ireland Test and at one stage the commentators couldn’t count how many players were on the field. Seriously, and they had three backs packing the scrum.
“We’ve gone the full hog where everything’s a yellow card, everything’s a red card. There needs to be some common sense come back in to the game.
“We’ve gone too far.”
While injured Wallabies star Andrew Kellaway agreed with Jones’s sentiments.
“Maybe I’m biased, I probably am, but what’s he supposed to do? He’s going for the ball and gets sent off,” Kellaway said on Stan Sport at half-time. “As a fan I hate to see that, as a player I hate to see it. The only people happy with it are England.”
For a sport that’s desperately trying to regain eye-balls, especially in Australia, mind-boggling laws such as these are turning punters away by the droves, with many on Saturday switching straight to the NRL. The continual bleating from the TMO only added to the issues.
While the crowd was left waiting in the cold as replay after replay was brought up on screen, punters at home had an extra voice added to the commentary every few minutes as the TMO intervened endlessly throughout the first half.
It was sluggish, taking close to two hours to play just 57 minutes of game time, with water breaks adding even more dead time to the game, while the lack of flow and stop-start from the TMO left everyone frustrated.
Once seen as a fast-paced, exciting spectacle, the game is becoming a pedantic, laborious watch with less ball in play and more replays, and while social media was fired up during the game and is likely to do so again during the decider on Saturday, don’t expect World Rugby to make any changes.