That the Champions Cup final drew gushing praise for its quality and level of entertainment had as much to do with the referee missing quite a bit and making decisions out of kilter with what his peers might have done as it did with the adventurous, attacking intent of the two teams.
The Cardiff finale to the EPCR season produced a fitting climax to a competition usually derided in the early weeks for its formatting but which then tends to gather steam in the deciding weeks when only the best and most committed teams are still involved.
That the SA teams weren’t involved once it got into the knockout phase needs to be redressed. The atmosphere at the Principality Stadium and the emotion and passion that went into the efforts of both the players and the fans of Bordeaux Begles and Northampton Saints is something we should want to be part of.
The fight put up by underdogs Northampton showed how much it meant to them, while the Bordeaux players being unable to bottle their celebrations when the game became safe while they were still on the field, was an indicator of how much it mattered to them too.
I wouldn’t want to get into a debate over whether the EPCR competition is superior to Super Rugby — the teams never play each other, so who really knows what the answer is.
It is incontestable, though, that this club competition matters most to the widest audience and is every bit rugby’s equivalent of soccer’s Champions League.
To me Bordeaux always looked about to put Northampton away but somehow the English team hung in. A Saints win would have inspired the other teams to be more confident that the French hegemony in the competition can be broken, but that dominance has now gone on for five years.
It was one of those rare days when the cliché about rugby being the winner was completely justified in the sense that Bordeaux deserved their win and yet the losers deserved enormous credit for being so valiant.
It could easily, though, have been a day for a completely different narrative, had the normally impeccable Georgian referee Nika Amashukeli and TMO Marius Jonker spotted an early high tackle that the television commentators had briefly highlighted.
They didn’t play it over and over but on first viewing it looked close to a red to me, as did the two tackle incidents that Amashukeli did get asked to adjudicate, for which he gave yellows.
That is said with reference to the question of what a red is these days and the trend we’ve got used to, particularly in the URC. Stormers prop Neethling Fouche’s red card against Ulster looked a lot less red than those two incidents Amashukeli gave yellows for and the one that was ignored.
He seemed eager to minimise sanctions because of the occasion, and there was another incident of a deliberate tap-down that he penalised but did not reach into his pocket for.
Northampton scrumhalf Alex Mitchell’s challenge in the air, which was penalised, could also easily on another day have seen a yellow or red card.
This is not a criticism of the referee. It is, in fact, the opposite, for the others should be more like him. There should be fewer cards and the level of force should be taken into account as per Amashukeli’s justification in Cardiff.
Where’s the consistency?
If Amashukeli had been reffing the Ulster/Stormers game Fouche would not have been red-carded and not have had to sit out three games.
Arguably the same might be said for the red card that has robbed the Stormers of Damian Willemse for the knockout stage of the URC.
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