Raynal was the centre of attention in the All Blacks' win over the Wallabies. Photo / Getty
Raynal was the centre of attention in the All Blacks' win over the Wallabies. Photo / Getty
OPINION:
For years, the All Blacks were haunted not just by the random and unjustifiable refereeing event in the final minute of the third test of the 2017 series against the British and Irish Lions, but also by the subsequent refusal of World Rugby to publicly address it.
As isnow embedded in folklore, French referee Romain Poite awarded the All Blacks a penalty – highly kickable – with the scores locked at 15-all, only to change his mind and call a scrum instead.
It denied the All Blacks their chance to win the series, but what came to hurt more was that World Rugby referee boss Alain Rolland is believed to have reviewed the game a few days later and determined that it was "the wrong decision but right result".
The whole business was bonkers and no one imagined there would ever again be a moment of controversy quite like it.
But here were are now, trying to make sense of the decision made by Mathieu Raynal in the last minute of the first Bledisloe Cup test of 2022.
He became the first referee in living history to discipline a team for time wasting, when in the final minute, with Australia three points ahead, he effectively reversed the penalty he had awarded the Wallabies when he determined Bernard Foley had taken too long to boot the ball into touch.
And now the rugby world is split as to whether it was justifiable or another case of a referee melting down at a horribly inconvenient time of a huge test match.
The conclusion to draw is perhaps that it was "the right decision but the wrong result", or at least the wrong time to have intervened in such a dramatic and game-changing way.
Time wasting has become the scourge of international rugby. Foley's 39-second charade was a clear-cut case – and whether the clock had been stopped or not, his intent was to deliberately cheat the All Blacks out of legitimate playing time to rescue the test.
But the overt is not the big problem in this time-wasting pandemic. It's the slow walk to the lineout after the elongated team huddle; the feigned injuries that require an army of water carriers to invade the field at breath-taking pace and leave it somewhat more glacially; and the endless failed scrum choreography.
These are where the time wasters operate most effectively, stealing extra seconds to recover, to recuperate and reorganise, and these acts of cynicism – or perhaps they are just plain cheating – have been allowed to manifest. Most tests in the last five years have been riddled with time-wasting antics that have never been called up.
The Wallabies are not renowned time-wasters by any means. They, like the All Blacks, want an aerobic contest and so it is ironic, or perhaps plain bad luck, that they were the first victims of a referee taking a stand.
But they did push their luck in Melbourne when they were down to 13 men and walked at funereal speed to restart the game after conceding a try – all the while Raynal was flapping madly to hurry them up.
Raynal was the centre of attention in the All Blacks' win over the Wallabies. Photo / Getty
And perhaps it was the ineffectiveness of his earlier attempt to speed the Wallabies up that made him snap. No doubt he felt powerless, impotent almost, and so decided he had, buried in the depths of the lawbook, the tools to do something about it.
It was a decision borne of frustration, and Raynal may have now cast himself as Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian-Serb who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand to spark World War I.
Even if the genesis and timing were debatable, there is now a sense that Raynal has started a war that needed to be fought.
Time wasting needs to be stamped out as part of a wider campaign to reduce the level of cynicism that has infiltrated the wider landscape, where it's commonplace now for players to dramatically tumble from innocuous collisions, to harangue referees to look at big-screen replays and mock opponents for every dropped ball or mistake made.
Rugby sells itself as virtuous and impervious to the gamesmanship that has infected football with a toxic core, but this piety is laughably misplaced, because in the last few years the 15-man code has become a game for hooligans played by hooligans – just another sport whose ethics and conduct have been held hostage by an overwhelming desire to win.
If Raynal's decision turns out to be a one-off, a wild moment that no other referee is prepared to emulate, then the Australians will forever be haunted by it, just as the All Blacks still carry the mental scars of that last Lions test.
But if it was the start of a movement to rid rugby of its worst habits and give referees the tools to penalise, without fear or favour, those who time-waste, then that crazy last minute in Melbourne will become a moment in time that everyone can make sense of.
