Mistaken officials only part of the problem for Scottish side with an unbalanced bench

Published on Saturday 14 February 2009 22:46

SCOTLAND have twice been the victims of erronious decisions by the television match official in matches against Wales and England in recent years and if skipper Mike Blair is to be believed then his team has again suffered at the hands of an official's incompetence.

"It was a forward pass when they scored," said Blair with not a hint of doubt in his voice. "But the referee and touch judge have to make a decision when it happens."

Certainly the Irish referee George Clancy appeared to be unsighted when flanker Fulgence Ouedraogo touched down early in the second half.

There was a strong suspicion that Clancy was blocking Scottish defenders and the official took forever to raise his arm for good reason; replays clearly show that the ball was handed forward to the scorer. Scotland coach Frank Hadden seems not only to have been crossed by a black cat but must have run it over… repeatedly.

However, not everything boils down to the bounce of the ball. Going into this match without a recognised lock on the bench looked like a high-risk strategy ahead of yesterday's game but it looked positively lunatic after 18 minutes which is when Jim Hamilton retired from the contest clutching his injured shoulder.

"We were disappointed it happened the way that it did," said Hadden, "but you can't cover every position on the bench. Maybe we got better as a result of the changes, it's almost impossible to tell."

This is spurious nonsense and Hadden has some form in this matter. Last year against Italy the coach took just two substitute backs to Rome only to see Simon Danielli limp off after seven minutes. To take two flankers on the bench and then claim that "you can't cover every position" is the very definition of disingenuous. Thankfully the coach was on much firmer footing when dealing with his players' efforts in the Stade de France, where they went some way towards banishing the memories of their horror show against Wales.

"We talked all week about the need to be brave today and we were. We needed to be ambitious this afternoon and we were. We knew we'd get a few handling errors and we got one or two too many. Unfortunately in being brave and ambitious we ended up at one try all. In our opinion we scored a perfectly good try that was disallowed."

Hadden was referring to an incident in the second half where Allan Jacobsen tackled the French scrum-half at the base of a ruck on the home line, Brown pounced on the loose ball but Clancy penalised the Scotland prop for being offside.

Hadden also compared the Scots' attack to their opposition, six line breaks in total compared to just three for the French, but then bewailed the penalty count which went the other way with Scotland conceding 13 to France's seven. A couple were genuinely mystifying as when Danielli and John Barclay were pinged for "dangerous" tackles but Hadden chose to ignore the root cause of many others… the front row.

In continuing the selection of a specialist loosehead playing out of position in the No.3 shirt, Hadden was almost guaranteeing his team would get on the wrong side of the man in the middle.

In fact the match ended with the French attacking the Scots from a five yard scrum which went absolutely nowhere. By this late stage the Scots had Moray Low earning his debut cap at tighthead and Ally Dickinson back on the loosehead. Two specialists in two specialist positions; the idea might catch on.