Winning games away should be worth more

PS I still believe the Crusaders at sr level and AB's at intl level are the best cheats, they are very very good at it. Why would it be a myth? Some team has to be the best. Who would you nominate as the best cheats? Not I do not mean dirty, thuggish play which is a totally different category. Kiwi teams are very clean in regard to this type of play.

intent is very easy to determine in a lot of cases. A player is at the bottom of the ruck on their back. they are not the ball carrier. they see the ball and use their hand to sweep it back to their side, obvious cynical cheat. a player is 4 metres in front of the kicker and runds for the ball when kicked. a player king hits another player from behind. nothing accidental in any of that. there are PLENTY of infringements where they have time and it is not a simple reaction time thing. there is a difference at lower levels in that skill levels being poorer means they have more chance of unintentional infringement , also poorer fitnes and as you get tired you cannot execute as well. So leaving keeping head above shoulders in rucks or scrums is harder. also i know plenty of players in lower grades who do not know all the laws so they dont know in some cases that they did wrong, an example is you cannot pull a person from a maul but plenty try. BTW I am not a reds supporter. finally all of this started with oj moaning about breakdowns not being reffed properly and that the crusaders were not being allowed to counter ruck. My response they were allowed to legally counter ruck just not leave their feet and seal the ball. far too many refs let them get away with this. Do the reds cheat, yes , higginbotham illegally blocked mitchell in the tahs game which caused his injury. Yes some of those passes look forward and probably genia knew he passed forwad but as you point out in this case hard to know if it was intentional! Reds like most teams join the rucks from the side on attack when clearing out or to prevent the ball being pinched, AND I believe the worst cases ie close to 90% is very intentional , cynical and cheating , Robinson does it a lot.

for me i guess peterK, i dont see any real difference in the mindset of a player in the lower grades and a player in the professional grades. you can watch any game at any level and see the same things happening, so this is irrespective of playing level. obviously the stakes are higher but this can be argued both for and against in an instance of perceived cheating. a player who knows the rules of their game and the game being officated by someone who also knows the game would make the relevance of whether a professional "knows" that they are intentionally infringing as opposed to an amateur almost a completely mute point. all players know the rules and you would have to agree that there is a split second of reaction time, where the player has to determine what move they will make. i just think its hard to claim "ïntent" when we can have no idea what is going on in someone elses mind in each specific instance. naturally you see the intent of kiwis infringing more/better because that is what you are looking for. but again, are you also looking at what your own team does? surely there is no discernable difference in intent from the reds (throwing passes forward) to the crusaders (being a nuisance at the ruck), but you are trying to say one thing is not intentional, but the other is!! personally i have always been happy enough with a game if the minor infringements are not policed to the point of exhaustion and have little impact on the overall scheme of things. however, like you, i decry it when it ruins the game with either ineffecient officiating/bias to one team over another or it turns into a free for all. i can understand that you being a ref doesnt help aswell as the fact that you are an ardent supporter of your team. just would be nice to see you criticise the reds (in this case) instead of running the same old myth that kiwis cheat better.

never said its ok for anyone to cheat, ever. I have said i dont admire anyone who does it or its ok. I have always said all teams cheat. its just the kiwis are best at it thats all. I do play sport and ref rugby. I accept you can infringe without it being cheating. But at sr level and higher it is obviously intentionally infringing, you know if you are off your feet and slowing the ball down, its blatant cheating.

Obviously your mother never read you Pinocchio, Peter.

If a team has a game plan to challenge the breakdown but got it wrong and were pinged 9 times for breakdown offences, what would people say about them?

oj - that is a function of style, the reds use a flat attack often the crusaders dont hence if the reds throw 100 flat passes more will go forwards as opposed to 5 flat passes by the crusaders.

Yes, Peter. Nine times in a single game yet the Crusaders can't get their timing wrong once.

funny that you also bleat and moan about ONLY kiwi sides and players cheating right peterK!! almost every post you make is full of "richie cheats/the crusaders cheat/kiwis always cheat" tripe. convenient how its ok for an aussie to do it but screaming blue murder when a kiwi does it. fact is, all players on all teams try and get away with what they can, sometimes even intentionally, but mostly, simply by competing for the ball in a physical contest. playing illegally is not just the province of the kiwis peterK and if you were a bit more objective you may have picked up how often the reds (in the posted game) infringed. but then again its a bit hard to be objective when one eye has a patch on it, and the other is made of glass!! i support my teams aggressively but if they do something stupid like throw a forward pass or lay all over the ruck i call them out (even if the ref misses it) but i would never claim that my team always does the right thing and just bleat on and on about how aussie teams and players use illegal tactics to the exclusion of all else. maybe get off the couch and try and play a bit of sport now and again (any sport) and see how easy it is to do what is technically a foul/penalty without even meaning to do it. as they say, "s--t happens". the ref made a massive hash of the end part of the game but to suggest that karma was coming back to bite the crusaders is pretty damn ridiculous.

if they deliberatley throw it forward, I think their tactic is for flat passes but it gets poorly executed sometimes by the runner overruning it or the pass is late. Thats making mistakes on a play rather than cheating in most cases, sure they sometimes no he is ahead and still decides to pass thats cheatin g and yes i dont like it. The point is it annoys you which I find amusing since you extoll the virtues of cheating by teams like the crusaders and ab's.

Uh, if you read what I said I called it "savvy" and all I really said was that it was annoying. But it's cheating Peter and I know how much that upsets you.

as you laugh when people complain about the illegal tactics by crusaders and you retort they should either copy them or do something about it, the shoe is on the other foot and of course it annoys you. funny that.

I agree the red line isn't the measure of a forward pass - BUT in this case, I think it's somewhat relevant to the discussion. In the absence of momentum - which was negligible in the first case and absent in the second, the trajectory of the ball (while not the determinative factor) does provide evidence that the passes were in fact thrown forward.

Its not just the crowds, Its not having to get up in a hotel. Its being in your natural surroundings. Its being able to go home after the game to the same bed. Particularly in provincial rugby. Tours just take it out of you. The Crusaders have done extremely well to be where they are. And the cheers for QLD were a lot louder but your right in saying that Aus teams would get less support from the crowd when they tour than NZ and SA touring teams. There are SO many kiwis at rugby games in Aus

Genia's first pass in the clip travelled forward, but was not a throw forward under the Law. This is because the ball was not passed in the direction of his opponent's dead ball line. The commentator is wrong. The later pass was in fact a throw forward under the Law, not because it travelled forward after leaving his hands, but because Genia threw it towards his opponent's dead ball line. The commentator in the You Tube clip is wrong in his use of the red line as the measure of illegality in both instances. Whether it travels forward or not is irrelevant; the only thing that counts under the Law is whether the ball was thrown forward from the passer's hands.

KT - There's good research (from soccer, but let's accept that there is some relevance for rugby) that there is a home team advantage effect on referee decisions, but an important finding of that research is that the more experienced referees record very low differentials between decisions in favour of home and away teams, and that it is likely that better "whistle" outcomes can be put down to the fact that home teams play better at home. Dickinson is the most experienced of all the RS15 referees, and while there is no research to confirm that he's more even-handed than any other referee, it's likely that his experience has made him so. This is confirmed to a degree by the reality that he's still being selected, and still at or near the top of the SANZAR rankings, as he has been for a decade or more.

The ball keeps going forward off Genia and Cooper's hands. It's noticeable by how far the receiver has to stretch to catch the ball.

Arbitro - that clip isn't really relevant to the sorts of forward passes the Reds seem to often get away with. OJ is referring to the ones thrown by Cooper & Genia where they're either standing still or crabbing across field with little forward momentum. Like the pass to Fai'inga in this clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo2WDHRVDWw&feature=player_embedded Or the pass to Higenbotham for the Reds second try against the Blues. Or the pass from Cooper in the movement leading up to their first try against the Blues. They like to play a flat offence and wait till the last possible second to throw the pass as it gives the defence less time to react to the ball carrier. It's hard to believe they don't also know this means there's a high chance they're gonna throw forward passes and get away with them.