SPIRO: Will the Queensland Reds be Berry'd in South Africa?

After 20 or so minutes of the Rebels-Reds match in Melbourne, I wrote down in my note-book: ‘Are the Reds terrific, or are the Rebels just terrible?’

The Reds had scored two tries, the first time this season they had achieved this in the first half of a match. The forwards were dominant. The backs were running some great lines. And Will Genia was, finally, having a blinder.

James Horwill exemplified the new energy and determination of the Reds with a bursting, powerful charge through a couple of defenders to score the opening try of the match with only six minutes on the clock.

This was the Horwill who made a similar charge to score a close range try as captain of the Wallabies in the quarter final of the 2011 Rugby World Cup against the Springboks.

The Rebels’ Mike Harris kicked a penalty a couple of minutes later. But the Reds stormed back, with Jake Schatz bursting across the try line.

Genia had made the same sort of sniping run down the blindside that was the feature of his play in 2013 when he was the best halfback in world rugby. Liam Gill, who had a mighty game, carried the ball on with a tremendous run before passing to Schatz.

The Reds for the first time this season were showing the sort of form that the pundits had expected of them before the season started, given their star-studded line up.

The onslaught wasn’t finished. The Reds were on attack again when Horwill had a total brain failure. There was a fiercely contested ruck. The head of a Rebels player was exposed. And Horwill dived in with his elbow smacking into the head of the Rebels player, Paul Alo-Emile.

Referee Matt O’Brien had no option but to dismiss Horwill from the game with a red card.

SANZAR’s Duty Judicial Officer Nicholas Davidson QC was right to reject Horwill’s explanation that his swinging arm was used ‘to gain momentum at the breakdown … there was no attempt to engage. As the Alo-Emile was not injured and played on, it was ruled that the infringement was ‘ineffectual.’

Because of Horwill’s relatively clean record in over 100 Super Rugby matches and an immediate apology, he was suspended for a week.

This moment of madness by Horwill, seeing red with the interests of the team ignored rather than Red and staying out of the ruck, turned the match.

The Rebels launched a ferocious lineout maul, from a lineout win by the impressive Lopeti Timani.

Quade Cooper kicked a penalty goal to take the Reds lead to 15-10.

But this was the last score by the Reds in the match.

A try in the 31st minute, unconverted, to Tom English evened the score at 15 – 15. In the second half, the Rebels, with their one-man advantage, played as the Reds did in the first 20 minutes and the Reds were reduced to the inept play shown by the Rebels at the beginning of the match.

All the statistics and territory favoured the Rebels in the second half. And the ensemble play the Rebels demonstrated in the first match of Super Rugby 2015 when they defeated the Crusaders at Christchurch re-emerged as attack after attack, with great lines and hard running, was mounted against the Reds.

I particularly liked the play of the Rebels halves, Nic Stirzaker and Jack Debreczeni. They are both future Wallabies, with Stirzker, if he takes the stir-crazy antics (like stamping on opposition forwards) out of his game, destined to be the long-term Wallaby halfback.

The winger Sefanaia Naivalu looks like a terrific acquisition for the Rebels, too, giving the team much-needed fire power out wide.

The Rebels head coach Tony McGahan came to the team last season with a big reputation. We are beginning to see why, on the evidence of this win over the Reds.

Not this season perhaps but next year, if McGahan can hold the squad together, the Rebels will be a formidable side matching any team in the competition.

I was surprised at the commentary during the Brumbies-Cheetahs that suggested the Brumbies should have scored a bonus point to have much credit out of their victory.

I was surprised because Planet Rugby had predicted only a 12-point winning margin for the Brumbies, and the score line was 20-3.

Admittedly the Cheetahs have leaked points all this year, averaging according to the commentators 35 points against them this season for each match.

Admittedly, too, the Brumbies started brilliantly, as they usually do in Canberra.

But often when a side looks like smashing a side early in the match, and doesn’t rack up the points for one reason or another, the points tally can go into a slow motion sort of progression. And this is what happened to the Brumbies.

There is one other factor, too, that applies to the Brumbies, the other Australian sides and all the South African sides. These teams do not have a coherent and planned structures for running the ball back from kicks.

The New Zealand sides do. I read somewhere that the All Blacks score a third of their tries from running the ball back from long kicks made by their opponents.

The New Zealand Super Rugby sides do this all the time and, as the Hurricanes showed with a superb try from under their posts against the Stormers, surely one of the tries if not the try of the season, they also attack from inside their 22 when it is on.

What all this does is add to the number of times the New Zealand sides can score tries. If you score, say, from every six or seven attempts to run the ball back, when your systems are working you are more likely to score a hatful of tries (given the number of times use long kicks to exit from defensive positions) than if you invariably return the kick with your own kick.

We saw this reality in the Sharks 10-52 Crusaders match. The Crusaders ran the ball back most times the Sharks kicked, which was very often, and scored eight tries to one.

The Sharks continued to kick the ball out of their territory, even when bizarrely they had 15 players against the 12 Crusaders, three of whom were sitting in their naughty chairs on the sideline.

The Crusaders ran for 579 metres, the Sharks for 304. The Crusaders had 108 carries and the Sharks 77. The Crusaders made 160 passes and the Sharks 92.

Compare these statistics with those of the Brumbies, who were dominant throughout their match against the Cheetahs. The Brumbies ran for 430 metres, made 138 carries, made 143 passes and scored two tries.

The Brumbies need to get out of the JakeBall attitude of almost always kicking out of their territory.

The Crusaders victory was all the more memorable because they were severely punished by the referee Stuart Berry. At half-time, with the Crusaders leading 28-3, Berry had awarded 10 penalties against the visitors, and only one penalty for the beleagured Sharks!

It beggars belief that a side is this much on top of their opponents and then concedes makes so many penalisable offences.

As well as the lopsided penalty count, the Crusaders in a short period of time had three players sent to the sin bin. They played out the last few minutes of the first half with only 12 players on the field.

I agree to a certain extent (but would be more critical of Berry) with the comments on Shayne Tavish Doyle on Planet Rugby about the yellow cards: ‘Nepo Laulala Yellow – fine can’t argue. Kieron Fonotia Yellow – well even the ref admitted he was stationary, even took a step back but I guess no arms, penalty yes, stretch for a yellow. Can’t even compare it to the Laulala tackle. Nemani Nadolo Yellow – the ball was so far off the penalty mark there was no quick start, even the SA commentators admitted that. Long shot for a penalty, Yellow – bullshit.’

My slight disagreement with this is that in the Fonotia incident, what I saw was a defending player trying to brace himself from a shoulder charge from the Sharks player carrying the ball. It is a natural and understandable reaction, and not a penalty offence in my view, when a defending player braces himself like this.

As S.T.Doyle noted on Planet Rugby, Fonotia did not move in aggressively with his shoulder, as someone making an illegal shoulder charge would do.

This willingness to dish out yellow cards to the Crusaders was not matched when it came to the penalising the Sharks.

When Jean Deysel ‘buried his knee into the head of a Crusaders players’, Berry was hesitant about giving a red card. He had to be talked into this by the TMO, Johan Greef.

Then we come to the matter of the battle between Wyatt Crockett and Jannie du Plessis. Where it took a number of collapses by Du Plessis before he was penalised, once.

Wyatt Crockett was warned in the first scrum that he had the responsibility to keep the scrum up. Then he was penalised, correctly, for not binding. But Jannie du Plessis was allowed to come up and to collapse most of the other scrums and was penalised only once.

Du Plessis is the South African equivalent of Australia’s own Bill Young, a terrible scrummer who has got away with collapsing scrums throughout his career.

As long ago as 2010, the Italians specifically accused du Plessis of ‘sometimes scrumming at an angle and not straight as the laws dictate.’

In 2007 Nick Mallett, a former Springboks coach, claimed that the Springboks scrum against the Pumas was ’embarrassing.’ The Springboks front row had a ‘nightmare’ time of the set pieces, Mallet insisted, with du Plessis having a ‘hell of an afternoon … I haven’t seen a Springboks scrum go back like that in years.’

Last year, the All Blacks prop Joe Moody suggested his Springboks opposite Jannie du Plessis employed illegal tactics at scrum time, ‘he often likes to attack the hooker a lot more. He comes in.’

Now go back a few weeks, the Crusaders pack, led by Wyatt Crockett at loosehead, absolutely monsters the Lions pack. So damaging is the destruction that the New Zealand referee Nick Briant sin bins the Lions prop Julian Redelinghuys.

This monstering repeated a demolition job done before on the Cheetahs scrum. This time two yellow cards are given against the Cheetahs props by the Australian referee, Andrew Lees.

The next matches facing the Crusaders were the Bulls and the Sharks, both in South Africa. The Bulls have been struggling with their scrum this scene. And the Sharks have Jannie du Plessis in their front row.

Enter South African Jonathan Kaplan, a former Test referee, on to the scene.

On his blog RateTheRef.Com Kaplan acknowledges that the Crusaders scrum was at their ‘ruthless best’ against the ‘poor Cheetahs.’ But: ‘I have been saying for some time – that their scrum, however powerful is not always legal. Crockett’s angles at scrum time have forced two of our tightheads to get yellow cards and essentially rendered the contest over.’

Notice the use of the word ‘our’ tighthead. Kaplan is clearly not impartial. He cites the ‘knowledgeable and admirable’ Justin Marshall as saying the same things as he did. But anyone listening to Marshall during the Hurricanes – Stormers game would call him anything but what Kaplan did. Ignorant and confused, would be better adjectives.

Anyway, the Crusaders were so rattled by Kaplan’s comments that they didn’t start Crockett against the Bulls. Crockett was penalised immediately he came on as a reserve prop.

This intervention by Kaplan is so self-serving to the interests of South African Super Rugby teams, given the history of poor Springboks scrumming and Jannie du Plessis’ scrumming in particular, that it raises issues about Kaplan’s judgment of referees from New Zealand and Australia and his criticism on non-South African players.

It raises the awkward question for South African referees, too, on why they take any notice of Kaplan’s biased comments.

Getting back to Stuart Berry and his performance against the Crusaders, it also has worrying resonances of his refereeing of the Lions-Reds match at Johannesburg last season, and the Lions-Blues a week earlier.

Writing in The Guardian, Rajiv Maharaj noted that the South African referee Stuart Berry gave ‘one of the worst officiating displays in the history of Super Rugby … Berry deserves to be put on the rack following back-to- back masterclasses in incompetence. His performances provide a compelling argument for neutral referees .. he penalised the Queenslanders 10 -1 in the second half. The Lions came from 20 -3 down to win … Reds coach Richard Graham sat motionless for a good minute or so after the final whistle. He’d never in all his life seen anything similar to what had just unfolded, he said later.’

On Sunday, Graham announced the Reds squad got play the Bulls and Cheetahs in South Africa in the next two weeks. Jake Schatz and Quade Cooper are out injured. James Horwill is suspended for a week. There has been a short turn around before the flight to South Africa.’

And there is the fact that with one win in seven matches the Reds have made their worst start to a season since 2007.

All Graham needs now to really make his day is for SANZAR to appoint Stuart Berry to officiate in one or both of the two matches the Reds face in South Africa.