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Making a poor tackle is not 'accidental' head contact. It's like driving at 180km p/h on a rainy day and then saying the collision with on-coming traffic was 'accidental'. I'm all for using more judgement and I'm OK with mitigating circumstances in situations where the tackler has almost no...

Did the contact happen or not? Accidental or otherwise really doesn't matter. If Kriel's tackle caused the head-to-head contact, whether he meant or not has no bearing. If you think that because it's accidental then it doesn't need to be penalised then you are absolutely saying that head...

Original contact is usually considered a mitigating factor that takes the penalty from a red card to a yellow or yellow to a penalty - not fully absolve the contact. There was no reason for there to be any head contact apart from Kriel just making a poor tackle. This was not some kind of...

Bullshit This is a case of ‘don’t believe your lying eyes!’ How can you get a still of head-on-head contact if it never happened? Are WR (World Rugby) suggesting it’s photoshopped? Even if there is chest on chest contact originally, this is usually considered as mitigation - not as total redemption.

Is it? Jack Dempsey and Grant Williams might disagree....

Bad luck? Luck has nothing to do with it. Give all the midweek games and short turnaround times to the Tier 1 nations with all the money depth to handle it then.

And yet I've given two recent examples of clear and obvious head contact that went completely unpenalised and, therefore, hasn't happened. If you don't want to see 'simulating' then 1. refs have to call these consistently and 2. players who take a dive need a consequence eg. automatic HIA

Does soccer have a TMO? Rugby currently has 3 refs on the field and another looking for incidents in the bunker. We don't need players simulating injuries - particularly when there has been no foul. We need the refs making the calls on head contact.

I thought refs were becoming more consistent with the foul play framework they have - tough though it may be. The issue right now is how they seem to be blatantly ignoring head contact on random occasions.

How Jesse Kriel stayed on the field is unbelievable. If Dempsey had fallen to the ground and held his head a la Marx or Vermeulen, would the TMO/ref been forced to look more closely at it? I don’t like how rugby is going with this. I’m OK with card for head contact but it has to be consistent...

I agree that Taylor should have cleaned Marchand out but there is no doubt that Wardi was on the wrong side and he interfered with Vaa’i’s attempt to clean Marchand out. Whether Vaa’i is accurate or not isn’t relevant. I also understand the ref reluctance to blow the whistle because Wardi LOOKS...

If by 'neck area' they mean 'shoulder' then sure. But there is no evidence that Barrett hit the neck on the Stan footage. There may be some better footage they have. It doesn't matter - refs get calls wrong and I'm of the firm belief that teams have to play at a level to take refs' calls out of...

Again - you're welcome to put such faith in the judiciary.... I'm tempted to go through the weekend's games and find players not binding LOL

I'm not worried about the first yellow - they were on a warning. All good. The second happens all the time - if Barrett isn't bound to Marx, then half of the rucks don't have players binding. Complete opposite of what I've said. We were terrible in the second half and the French were too...

Pretend I am….what laws did Barrett break that deserved a yellow?

Yeah….the judiciary is really trustworthy LOL If going off your feet is yellow card worthy then refs are gonna need more pockets to hold them all

It's frustrating, partly because when we deal with the problem as it should be, we get a player carded and ending up at the judiciary. Cos this is what happened with Scott Barrett. A clean-out that was a penalty, at worst, left us with a man down for the rest of the game against South Africa...

With the Ben Darwin 'cohesion' philosophy in mind, it's quite easy to see where the ABs lacked their spark in the backline and the work done by the back row. I was getting a bit frustrated by how the French players would fall on the wrong side of the tackle and get in the way of ABs trying to...

Yeah - I feel like Smith is so key to the ABs success. I don't know if that's the same as being a 'game winner' but I feel like he will leave a pretty big hole after this RWC.

Interesting listening to Ben Darwin's comments. Going by the data they have and use, he thinks Smith is far and away a better 9 than Dupont.