Commentators mainly Bray whining about the sealing off calls but they were 100% technically correct penalties imo.
true, but i think his general complaint was a fair one. the US were penalised 4 times with ball in hand for some pretty innocuous infringements.
in most rugby games there's a fair bit of players going off your feet at the ruck, or these days guys cleaning out defenders from the side of the ruck (dare i say the Japanese were guilty of a bit of that last night) A lot of it is just ignored. the really blatant stuff is penalised. i dont think it would have killed him to let some of those things slide, provided he's consistent. He seemed a bit too eager to blow his whistle. Case and point was the forward pass call that went against Samoa in the second half. The pass looked fine to me, it was actually a nice piece of skill.
funnily enough though, he barely policed the offside line at all in the first half, when the US were regularly offside.
My big criticism is that the ref should be giving the advantage, and the benefit of the doubt, to the attacking team. Clancy was often pulling up the attacking team for board-line infringements while allowing both sides' defensive lines to creep up offside.
