A penalty try, then a scuffle nobody expected
Soweto handed South Africa a penalty try from a scrum five metres out. What people are still arguing about is what happened while referee Nika Amashukeli was awarding it.
Cam Roigard and Cobus Reinach got tangled. Reinach threw the New Zealand scrum-half to the ground. Roigard went down holding his face, the TMO flagged the scuffle, and the penalty came back the other way against the Springboks.
Jean de Villiers called it live on SuperSport. “A lot has been said about gamesmanship, and I will call it out there; this game of ours is a pride one, and he is taking a dive there. Yes, he rips him over, but that is certainly not a tip tackle,” the former Springboks captain said.
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Burger wants the card going the other way
De Villiers took the clip back onto the Verdict show alongside Schalk Burger and Hanyani Shimange. Burger did not soften it.
“Why doesn’t Cam Roigard get a yellow card? Instead, we get a penalty against us on the half-way line for a bit of gamesmanship,” he said, before reaching for Nigel Owens’ line to Stuart Hogg at the 2015 World Cup. “They can come play soccer here next week. That’s not called for in our game.”
Burger went further. He reads the penalty try as coming from an offside at the set piece, which in his view should have carried a yellow for Roigard or Luke Jacobson. Amashukeli explained to Siya Kolisi that no card was issued because the offence was collective rather than one player’s. Burger disagreed flatly: “It should have been a penalty try, yellow card and nothing in Reinach versus Roigard.”
A habit the players will have to break themselves
Shimange, a former hooker, widened it out. He is tired of watching men stay down, take a head injury assessment nobody quite believes, and leave an opponent facing a red card and a suspension over an accident.
Burger agreed and put the responsibility back in the dressing rooms. “The animation stuff must stop. All of them,” he said. “You get guys now where the doctor runs on and the guy’s holding his neck, but he’s not really that sore. So they need to cut that out of the game.”
He thinks the sport is stuck in a phase where too much rides on single moments and players know what selling one is worth. “It’s the current crop of players; we can’t do anything about it. They’ve got to actually sit down and say, ‘That’s not good enough.’”
De Villiers ended the debate by noting this is not new ground for Roigard, who drew the same criticism during Super Rugby Pacific this year, while calling him an unbelievable player and stressing the problem runs well beyond one number nine.
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