Summer internationals week 2: match thread
Summer internationals week 2: match thread
A feast of rugby tomorrow, anyone attending? Predictions welcomed, reviews also appreciate
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England gonna give NZ a really hard game unless their kicking for goal improves here
Nika Amashukeli just isn't up to standard; both teams have a lot to be frustrated about due to his rulings. Thankfully he was equally bad so overall it balanced out, but it made for an absolute shambles at ruck time (similar to the game vs Argentina a couple years ago). I think you could make an argument that the mess he allowed to happen at the rucks is what led to TJ Perenara's unfortunate injury.
I thought him not too bad actually, I liked his breakdowns. Felt flowing to to me. Nothing I actively disagreed with on the whistle either
Perhaps it's just a huge divergence between NH & SH on the breakdown. Down here you're not allowed to chuck your hands on the ground as much as he was allowing; and once the ball is lost the ref basically tells them to clean it up and get the game going again. Whereas in this game when the tackle area had definitely become a ruck he was still happy for newly arriving players to stick their hands on the ball to slow it down.
They're also a lot stricter on the direction they're coming in on the breakdown as well. So generally in SR it was a lot tidier than in this game; with less players off their feet even when the defending team counter-rucked and blew past the ball.
I was also pretty frustrated by his guesswork and inconsistency at scrum time. The very first scrum dropped with Marler not taking the hit & hinging as much as Lomax overreaching with the gap being set too far apart. He gave a straight arm for that, but then in the 2nd half was resetting scrums for basically the same thing. The use it call on the ABs scrum that took the feed, hooked the ball and then started moving forward was a bit much too I thought.