Somebody on here has a signature that says "you can go to the end of time and at the world cup the all blacks will be faves for it" - or something along those lines. This needs to be amended.
You can go to the end of time and after every All Black victory there will be people on GAGR claiming ref bias favouring the AB's.
Look, here's how it is. Playing the ref is one of the biggest parts of rugby. We do this better than most and when we fail to do it, we often lose - see 2007 WC qtr. On Sunday, Joubert ref'd the way he always does - in his style. We'd learned it, taken it on board and thus played a game to it. France bought their A game & didn't play Joubert as well as we did. And thus we won - that's how it is, nothing more, nothing less. No bias, no home crowd advantage, no paddy conspiracy, no McCaw is untouchable, nothing. We just played the ref better.
Joubert is the best ref in the world & got the gig because of it.
Chief - although you seem a bit close to the boy who cried wolf, I do agree with you on Barnes. However, Barnes created more controversy than most refs on the back of his calls in this tourney, and thus awarding him a knockout woud be conclusive proof that the ref managers are indeed just going to their agenda, on not going on what they are seeing. Joubert was not controversial at any stage (discounting a few french folks which I can understand and of course, the usual AB-are-cheats-ref-are-biased knocking brigade on GAGR who I discount anyway).
As for the kick going over.. anybody with eyes that work, can look at any replay anywhere and see the ball passing in front of the right stick, and thus through the goal. The fact that this has generated any "controversy" is rock hard proof that there are those out there who will do anything to try and discredit/take away the NZ world cup win.
