Before his infamous row with Rassie Erasmus last year, leading Australian referee Nic Berry was blowing the whistle on Cameron Shepherd.
The former Wallabies star shared the hilarious tale on Stan Sport’s Between Two Posts during a wider discussion of the refereeing standards in Super Rugby Pacific.
Shepherd admitted he was “very critical” of referees, perhaps taking the opportunity to exact some payback for what he saw as harsh calls during his playing days.
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The Berry story he recalled came while he was commentating the 2017 Australian Club Championship final between Norths and Brothers at Brisbane’s Crosby Park.
“I said something along the lines of ‘Nic Berry needs to get control here, like this is just a shambles, the scrum keeps falling apart, that was a knock on’ and I got on a bit of a roll of bagging Nic Berry,” Shepherd said.
“At halftime he comes walking over to the big tower where Swainy (Andrew Swain) and I were calling from. I was like ‘this is weird’ because it kind of feels like he’s walking towards us, why would he be doing that?
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https://twitter.com/StanSportRugby/status/1508620861682581506?s=20&t=9D4Jzkfi9Gicq3gvhp_8QA
“And one of the girls from Fox Sports walks out to check with him and he’s playing with his earpiece and he starts yelling. ‘I can’t hear anything in here except these two muppets abusing me!’
“Somehow it’d been crossed, set up so he could hear the full commentary. 40 minutes of us just telling him how bad he was at refereeing.
“I don’t think he really enjoyed it too much.”
Sean Maloney and Andrew Mehrtens are joined by Cam Shepherd and Sean’s puppy as they look back at an epic round of Super Rugby Pacific. Interesting refereeing, bad fancy dress and planking all feature in this week’s episode
https://omny.fm/shows/between-two-posts-1/seal-maloney-and-weird-wykesy/embed
Shepherd’s recollection encouraged show co-host Andrew Mehrtens to share his own Berry story from their time together playing in France for Racing Metro.
All Blacks legend Mehrtens had just arrived at the Paris club after signing from Toulon and halfback Berry was understandably excited.
“Nic rang his old man back in Australia and said ‘we’ve got this former All Black that’s signed at the club, I’m going to be throwing the ball out to him this year’,” Mehrtens said.
“And his old man said ‘oh mate, that’s great, watch and learn, he’s got a lot of experience, played international rugby so learn his processes and just absorb as much as you can.’ And I was rooming with Nic when we’ve got up to Lille.
“Next thing I’ve forgotten my boots, forgotten my underpants and forgotten my mouthguard. And I’ve only discovered this on the morning of the game.
“He’s like ‘I’ve got a new three pack of undies, I haven’t worn any of them, you can borrow some of those.’
“He said ‘I think I saw a chemist down the road, you can go and get one of those mouldable mouthguards’ and I had to go and find someone who had the same pair of boots who had happened to bring two.
“I’m like ‘there you go, there’s professionalism for you, right there, lesson learned’.”
Shepherd, a former Australian under-21s teammate of Berry, was in stitches.
“No wonder he became a referee – a three pack of spare undies?! That’s a man that’s driven, organised. Nic Berry, a good human though.”
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