Chris Rattue: When bitter and twisted goes too far

Bryce Lawrence approached a brilliantly tense quarter-final under the strange notion that he would control it, says Chris Rattue. Photo / Mark Mitchell

How comforting to know that other countries do bitter and twisted as well as we do. The bile-spitting South Africans who employed their internet skills against referee Bryce Lawrence have even outdone our lot who claimed, incorrectly, that Wayne Barnes alone stuffed up the All Blacks' 2007 World Cup campaign.

Not that it pays to judge a Bok by this sort of coverage - I'm sure that a lot of South African supporters understand their World Cup ground to a halt in Wellington because dinosaur forwards were hitched to one-dimensional backs. They had opportunities aplenty to win that quarter-final against Australia, just as the All Blacks did against France in Cardiff four years earlier.

Among those angry with Lawrence, the vast majority can vent their feelings without threatening him as the morons have done. Had he ruled any differently, there is no guarantee at all a blundering Springbok side would have won, that the Wallabies - with a run of wins against South Africa - would not have adapted better.

The trouble with rugby is this: it is tailormade for excuse-wielding fans, players and coaches. The game is a tangled mess of subjectivity guided by a rulebook the size of a small truck, under the administration of referees who are on career paths, and watched by a lot of us stupefied by that dominating part of the game where Greco Roman wrestling meets the latter stages of a beer festival.

Rugby has always required players to adapt to the referee and try to deceive him - that's what rugby is. Yet professionalism - or the desire to protect careers and reputations - finds the losers, usually, calling for levels of precision and consistency from referees that are unobtainable. When it comes to ruck and mauls, one man's gate is another man's side entrance, or a champion a "cheat".

Much of rugby is a frustrating shambles and always will be, yet referees are now forced to hammer offences for fear of being yellow-carded by their bosses and having their safety threatened by nutters on the internet.

As for Lawrence, his path is downwards, especially after vilifying himself. For unknown reasons, Lawrence not only approached what became a brilliantly tense quarter-final under the strange notion that he would control it in a "less technical" manner, but has also chosen to retrospectively reveal his mad plan to the world. Now he can't be risked in South Africa, apparently, for safety reasons.

Lawrence appears a most unnatural referee, but then again most of the modern lot do because they are non-playing career opportunists who are trained that way. Retiring players who may have more clues are hardly lining up to batter other players with the very sub-clauses which shackled their own careers. But Lawrence ain't no cheat, as those deranged bile-spitters allege.

I recall the nail-biting quarter-final in completely different terms. A match now stamped with infamy actually featured one of the truly great openside performances by the Australian David Pocock while the Springboks were exposed as a brittle, stupid side overly hampered once their own superb fetcher Heinrich Brussow was forced off. (There are steel pylons with more dexterity than the over-hyped No8 Pierre Spies.) The tension at the ground was wonderful.

I do seem to recall, fondly, that the veteran Springbok lock Victor Matfield shook Lawrence's hand immediately the game ended.

Less appealingly, the warhorse captain John Smit later made a derogatory comment about the referee. Smit was part of the problem, his status keeping out the world's top strongman hooker Bismarck du Plessis. You won't find Smit admitting to his late-career failings, and he found a convenient smokescreen named Bryce Lawrence. They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but old dogs have enough tricks of their own.

Wells 'shocker'

New Zealand cricket will have to do better than this if they want to surprise most of us.

"Shock inclusion" screamed a headline, the story revealing that an Otago cricketer named Sam Wells will join the long list of people who have played cricket for this country.

If you own a bat and can get around sight unaided by a specially trained pooch then you are a chance to play for the New Zealand cricket side. Anyone already employed in one of our six Plunket Shield squads can feel aggrieved if they don't get a call-up.

The Dalai Lama would rate as a shock selection for the New Zealand cricket side, but not Sam Wells. The moment he donned those whites for Otago, he became a reasonable certainty.

Good on ya, ClarkeEmployee of the week ... is the Australian cricket captain Michael Clarke, for resisting the bureaucratic schemes to enforce a rotation selection system for his bowlers based on an injury-prevention formula. Long may strong captains keep the number-crunchers and pencil-pushers at bay, thus giving sport a chance of remaining a human experience.

Remarkable survivor Arsene Wenger is an anomaly in the brutal atmosphere of English Premier League soccer. His employers at Arsenal are incredibly loyal to their once champion manager, even though his development and playing tactics are no longer up to the standards required of a major club with European aspirations. I doubt even Manchester United maestro Sir Alex Ferguson would have survived Wenger's run of relative failure. Wenger also gets a wonderful ride in the press - I can't verify this, but have been told he is a top source of inside information for the big newspapers.