All Blacks great Andrew Mehrtens has lashed out at World Rugby for what he says is “rubbish” refereeing and interjecting from officials.
The outburst comes after the second match against the Wallabies and England was littered with stoppages and TMO reviews.
England coach Eddie Jones was among those to express his frustration. That sentiment was shared by All Blacks coach Ian Foster after their match against Ireland was punctuated by cards.
Watch the Wallabies v England live on 9Now and every match ad-free and in ultra clear 4K on Stan Sport.
One incident, in particular, caught the ire of Mehrtens that saw Izaia Perese fail to intercept a wide pass.
That was deemed a deliberate knock-on and a yellow card offence, for which Perese spent 10 minutes on the sin bin.
After expressing his disdain on the night, the Stan Sport commentator doubled down in the latest episode of Between Two Posts.
Live from the The Pig ‘N’ Whistle, Sean Maloney and Andrew Mehrtens review all the action from the epic Test clashes between the northern and southern hemisphere as well as keeping an eye on the exciting Pacific Nations Cup in Fiji
https://omny.fm/shows/between-two-posts-1/the-pig-n-whistle-itchy-itchy-sea-lice/embed?style=Cover
“I’ve got to be careful here because I’m a long-term critic of the refereeing,” said an irritable Mehrtens.
“I still don’t think it’s up to scratch. It’s a hard game to referee, we know that, we know that there are going to be human errors. I just can’t condone some of the decisions that when we do have time to look at things and slow it down and make an accurate call with multiple angles and we’re still getting it wrong and we’re still being inconsistent.
“I think across all the games on the weekend we saw too many inaccurate calls. It’s not all the referee’s fault either. I think a lot of it is the direction coming down; how they’re being told to referee. Some of it just defies logic.
“The Perese yellow card is ridiculous. You say it’s a clear and deliberate knock-on, no it isn’t. It’s not a clear and deliberate knock-on at all. If you say he’s not in a realistic position that’s coming from someone with no skill that thinks that’s not a realistic position to intercept the ball. He could’ve got that ball.
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“He definitely wasn’t deliberately trying to knock it on. The whole thing about that deliberate knock-on, as soon as you say deliberate, that doesn’t even imply intent. It specifies that there was intent to knock it on. There wasn’t. It’s just rubbish.
“They’ve got to have a look at it and they won’t,” he said of the governing body.
“They just won’t. No matter how often you say to the refereeing bodies, and particularly up the top from World Rugby, that you’ve got it wrong; no they don’t. ‘Everyone else in the world is wrong, we’re right’.”
Fellow player-turned-commentator Sean Maloney added his frustrations, pointing toward a cleaner third and final Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground.
Maloney bemoaned the numerous stoppages that he said will only serve to disengage fans.
“Let’s hope this weekend we see far less interventions from certain match officials inside the game because the match just had so many moments where the steam was let out of it,” said Maloney.
“It would build-up to this crescendo and then we’d be going back looking three, four phases earlier for the most minuscule little things for a chance for the TMO to get involved and it killed any real momentum.
“For people watching at home, people are switching off after some of the outrageous interpretations of some of the laws that they try to stick to.”
The Sydney Cricket Ground hosts the closing match between the Wallabies and England this Saturday.
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