Penalty count confuses

Wairarapa-Bush rugby coach Peter Russell admits to being confused as to why his side were so often penalised at the tackled ball situation, during their NPC third division match with South Canterbury, at Memorial Park, Masterton on Saturday.
One of the country's top-ranked referees, Lyndon Bray, had control of the game, and his penalty count was heavily against the home side, especially in the second half.
Most of the infringements seem to occur in the tackled ball area, with Bray often ruling that Wairarapa-Bush players were stopping the ball from being released.
"Quite honestly, I can't really say much about what we were doing wrong because I'm not exactly sure what it was myself," Russell said. "We were getting to the breakdowns in bigger numbers and when that happens you don't usually have to infringe to get the ball, do you?"
Russell considers the high penalty count against Wairarapa-Bush certainly had an effect on their second half performance which was clearly inferior to that of the first half.
"It made it hard to get any momentum going ??..there was a lot of static play," he said.
Hurricanes assistant coach Murray Roulston has been invited to attend Wairarapa-Bush's next training session on Tuesday night and Russell said the tackled ball situation would be discussed at length there.
"Obviously if we are doing something wrong then we need to rectify it," he said.
The positive manner in which Wairarapa-Bush started the first half of Saturday's game and kept it going for the opening 40 minutes was pleasing to Russell, who had stressed to his side the importance of getting South Canterbury on the back foot from the word go.
"We wanted to dictate how the game was going to be played and to have such a big lead at halftime was very satisfying," he said. "There was some excellent inter-changing of passing between forwards and backs and each time we scored we were straight back into it on the restart. That's the sort of pressure you have to apply to win at this level."
Wairarapa-Bush's is at home again next weekend when they play cellar dwellers Thames Valley, but while a comfortable win should occur, Russell was quick to note Thames Valley had only gone down by two points to King Country on Saturday.
"They (Thames Valley) are probably out of contention for the title, but you can bet they'd like nothing better to knock off one of the top teams," he said. "It's important we keep our feet on the ground and don't think that they will be easy. We want the five points and we'll have to work hard to get them."