tukapa1:

Kopkiwi: And yet if they could keep 15 on the field they’d put 50 on us.

Wow - that's the exaggeration of the year.

Kopkiwi: They’ve comfortably put 34 on us so far while playing with reduced numbers and they have carved us open at will through the middle. Head out the sand bro. This All Blacks team is terrible.

Haven't watched it, but I see we got a late penalty for them kicking to touch too slow, so we got a try off that. Yellow cards galore. Glad I didnt watch it. 

3 of the 4 teams are poor. ARG is going well for them, being a low Tier 1 team, so they never win, but yes they do

Skills, decisions, etc etc its all a rabble. Be quite nice if rugby players follow the rules for once, do they not know the rules or are just cheating??? Every game its the same, yellow yellow yellow

dfnt: What a f’d up game, never seen anything like that

Really surprised Swain didn’t get a red for targeting that knee

Yeah, I think we can expect the RWC next year to have games like this. There is to much variability in the way the games are officiated. I uttered an expletive when I saw who was reffing, and my opinion hasn’t changed.

Without dissecting the game too much, some key moments;

The Havilli/Cane headclash. Replacements disrupted both the forwards and backs rhythm.

Swain’s yellow card for deliberately injuring Tupaea. Thuggery deserves a red. And he had just done a shoulder to the head in the same ruck to try and clean out Tupaea. Left the Wallabies with 13 players on the field.

Mo’unga putting the kickoff out on the full. Ritchie had a good game but that one mistake meant instead of playing in the Aussie 22, it gifted the Wallabies possession on halfway that, after a couple of penalties, led to a Wallabies try.

And of course, the final sequence. From what I remember, that was the third time during the game that the ref had called “time off” for the Wallabies time wasting to try and run the clock down. On each occasion he warned them.

Other observations;

Nick Whyte was lucky to not be yellow carded for going off at the ref after he awarded that final scrum. And it will be interesting to see if he gets sanctioned for abusing the officials after the final whistle.

Beauden Barrett looked lost when he first came on to replace Tupaea. Only looked comfortable after halftime when the positions were rejigged.

Pete Samu is a beast that the ABs will need to figure out how to neutralise.

Taukei’ahoe is clearly the best hooker we have.

tdgeek:

3 of the 4 teams are poor. ARG is going well for them, being a low Tier 1 team, so they never win, but yes they do

Skills, decisions, etc etc its all a rabble. Be quite nice if rugby players follow the rules for once, do they not know the rules or are just cheating??? Every game its the same, yellow yellow yellow

Reffing was quite inconsistent, but for me the Wallabies came out better with most of the calls. That try was 100% off a forward pass, and I think there was a cardable neck roll in one of our (correctly) disallowed tries, but they hardly showed a replay of it (wonder why). Swain should be red all day, just about for both the dodgy cleanout & targeting Tupaea's knee. I hope he gets cited.

Feel so gutted for Tupaea - he could have done multiple ligaments from that and might even be in doubt for the RWC. Hope it's not a bad as it looked. 

Wallabies were wasting time really badly whenever they were down a man, or men. Ref gave them the hurry up multiple times, and Foley had multiple warnings at the end there. Kellaway was yelling at him to hurry up and kick it for goodness sake. If the shoe had been on the other foot, and we had been penalized for time wasting like that, I would not be unhappy. Sure, the result sucks given the situation, but time wasting like that needs to stop. Hopefully this might help that. 

Also, we should have scored at least 2 more tries, if not 3, so in that case none of this would even be a talking point. I think we are on the right track, but there is still a lot of work to do. Compare now to the games against Ireland though, I think we are making good progress & have much better people in assistant coaching roles. 

Just got a long, long way to go still. 

tdgeek:

 

3 of the 4 teams are poor. ARG is going well for them, being a low Tier 1 team, so they never win, but yes they do

 

Skills, decisions, etc etc its all a rabble. Be quite nice if rugby players follow the rules for once, do they not know the rules or are just cheating??? Every game its the same, yellow yellow yellow

 

To be fair the Rugby rule book would make Unix Manuals look like leaflets. The rules of rugby are many and complex, there would be very few players globally that would have a thorough knowledge. 

MikeB4:

 

To be fair the Rugby rule book would make Unix Manuals look like leaflets. The rules of rugby are many and complex, there would be very few players globally that would have a thorough knowledge. 

 

Fair enough. Rugby needs to evolve then. Ive played a few sports, some competitively. Rules are rules. Im wondering what would be the case if last nights game was reversed? The ball was in the other court. Then, the penalty for delaying would be wrong. AB's would be aggrieved. Thats the theme. AB's win lets bag them. AB's lose   lets bag the ref, and so on.

In any case it was a poor performance by us, win, lose or draw. We will win the Championship but do we want to win by being great, or do we want to win as we were the best of an extremely average lot? 

I love sport, Id rather play great and lose than play crap and win, thats just me

Todays team is no where near the AB's of recent times when we dominated. Either we have degraded or the opposition have improved, unsure whats the case. We know RSA and AUS are not great. ARG are never great but they try really hard. In the series, anyone can beat anyone, and anyone can be humbled, that is what has happened. IRE was no fluke. And ARG has triumphed, just like that.

Admittedly Im tiring of it. Poor then 50-3 then poor, thats been the theme this year. I feel, anecdotally, that the other nations have evolved, rugby has matured where the rest have caught onto why we dominated forever. 

We need to step up. Last nights match was a loss, irregardless of the technical score. Go back to RWC AB's vs ENG, nothing has changed. Racking up wins over the island nations (and its great for them for that exposure) doesnt help