Cold-shouldered Raynal has been handed an Autumn Nations reprieve
French referee Mathieu Raynal has been handed a reprieve following the fallout from his controversial time-wasting penalty in the final minute of last September’s Rugby Championship match between the Wallabies and the All Blacks in Melbourne. The official penalised Australia’s Bernard Foley for time wasting when he had a penalty that he was readying to kick into touch with time almost up at the Marvel Stadium.
The hotly debated decision handed the All Blacks possession and they soon scored to grab victory from the jaws of defeat, igniting arguments around the rugby world over whether Raynal was correct to be so strict about what he had done.
It was some days later, ahead of the Wallabies-All Blacks rematch in Auckland, when Australia boss Dave Rennie claimed that World Rugby had conceded the crunch call made by Raynal in his team’s loss was wrong.
“They agreed with our concerns,” said Rennie at the time. “We sought a bit of clarity. We have got that… We have decided to take it on the chin and move on.”
While Raynal kept his appointment as an assistant referee for that follow-up Bledisloe Cup match at Eden Park, it was noticeable that he had slipped down the referee pecking order when World Rugby announced its teams of officials for the 40 matches across the men’s Autumn Nations Series programme.
Raynal was just given a single match to officiate, the November 19 game between Romania and Samoa in Bucharest. That low-key fixture was in sharp contrast to the high-profile type of Test matches he was usually appointed for - but he has now been handed an unexpected reprieve for this coming weekend.
Jaco Peyper, the South African who was in charge for last Saturday’s France versus Australia match in Paris, has reported an injury and his appointment as the referee for this Saturday’s game in Dublin between Ireland and Fiji has now gone to the idle Raynal.
A World Rugby statement read: “World Rugby has confirmed a change to the match officials for the Ireland vs Fiji match on November 12. Mathieu Raynal (France) will now referee the match at Aviva Stadium in the Autumn Nations Series.
“Raynal replaces Jaco Peyper (South Africa), who is unavailable due to injury. The other appointments remain unchanged with Tual Trainini (France) and Jordan Way (Australia) as assistant referees and Chris Hart (New Zealand) as the television match official.”
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Finau is definitely operating on razor thin margins. He hasn’t done anything wrong… yet. But a player going into contact 6 inches lower than he is expecting, without him even knowing, will end in disaster. You can imagine a situation where the pass dies on Edmed and he has to bend down a little lower to catch it at the last second. Finau’s hit would have been catastrophic. The margins are just too fine. He needs to study how PSDT, at 6’7”, manages to drop his tackle height and exert just as much force with close zero danger of taking someone’s head off. Given how poorly NZ has adapted to lower their tackle height, and that this issue which has plagued the ABs for years and played a big part in them not winning the World Cup, I thought NZR and all SR coaches would be prioritising sorting this issue out. If I was Razor I would be on the phone to Clayton MacMillan and Samipeni Finau saying exactly that. Finau is a monster and shaping up to be the closest thing to Kaino since Kaino, but I wouldn’t risk selecting him for the ABs at the moment.
Go to commentsThe surprising stat I saw in the Blues game when showing Sotutu equaling the Blues forwards record was that Akira has not scored a try since 2019. Now my memory is pretty bad when it comes to those sorts of the things, I can remember his AB try though, but anyway I can’t see I can remember his last blues touchdown or any in recent years. Surely that still has to be a bogus stat. Maybe excludes SRA games?
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