Rogue’s gallery

It’s five minutes into a highly-charged test match between the Springboks and the All Blacks and Bakkies Botha is feeling the red mist come down.

Exchanges have bordered on the pernicious and now he makes a tackle on Mils Muliaina, cuffing the All Black fullback with the elbow as they go down.

Seeing this Richie McCaw takes exception and pushes Botha off his fullback; the whistle goes, but Botha has lost it, picks up McCaw, lifts his legs up above his head and roughly spears him to the ground.

It’s an idiotic thing to do and Botha is in trouble. The referee blows his whistle shrilly, his assistant waves his flag frantically and the upshot is that Botha is yellow-carded; causing South Africa to have to play ten minutes without a tight forward and this early disadvantage results in their losing the test.

Overnight Botha is cited for dangerous play; he appears before a disciplinary tribunal and is suspended for six weeks for executing a dangerous tackle deemed to be in the mid-range of seriousness; the SANZAR Judicial Officer noting that Botha had also been guilty of a striking offence and that his misdemeanor took place after the referee’s whistle.

Botha’s defence that his act constituted no more than bad sportsmanship is rejected and he is warned that he is fortunate not to have been given a harsher penalty.

Call me paranoid if you will but I have no doubt that had it been Bakkies Botha (or Schalk Burger, or Butch James) who committed the foul Brad Thorn executed on John Smit that would have been the outcome.

One thing that came out of my research for the Springbok Saga series was just how often South African teams and players came out on the wrong side of decisions by referees or were treated more harshly when it came to the sanctions of judicial hearings – made even worse when you include events in the Super 12 and 14.

I have often been asked why this should be and, to be frank, I have no idea. There was the time the Aussies and the Kiwis, in an exchange of e-mails, derogatorily referred to us as “Japies”, indicating an element of prejudice, but we have also not done too well under the ministrations of arbiters from Europe and elsewhere.

From a South African perspective how’s this for a rogue’s gallery? (Sensitive readers be warned: Avert your eyes now!) Stuart Dickinson, Peter Marshall, Wayne Erickson, Paddy O’Brien, Jim Fleming, Paul Honiss, Derek Bevan, Colin Hawke, Didier Mené, Ed Morrison, Dave McHugh, Steve Walsh, Tony Spreadbury, Pablo Deluca and Joel Jutge.

Sure, Brad Thorn was cited and suspended. But that should not have been necessary if the match officials acted in a consistent way. If Thorn’s dumping of John Smit was not a spear tackle then I did not watch the Super 14!

The incident took place in the fifth minute of the test in Wellington and we can but speculate on what effect it might have had on the All Blacks to have to see out ten minutes without a tight forward.

Of course we will never know, but experience of past such incidents has shown that the team that has been thus undermined struggles to win. What’s more Smit was injured because of the tackle.

In the end the All Blacks won and won better than the score indicated because they had a fair try by Jerome Kaino disallowed, but if the correct ruling had made in the fifth minute it might have turned out very differently and that’s what rankles.