We don’t seem able to get the hang of French referees, do we?
We’ve had three French refs this season – Luc Ramos (twice), Pierre Brousset and Matthieu Raynal – and lost every time.
I didn’t make any notes on this game and I’m not inclined to re-watch it, even if the option was there, so this is going to be short and lacking in detail.
I’m putting this defeat down primarily to something that we seemed to have fixed last week: discipline. You can’t win a match if you keep surrendering the initiative to the opposition — not easily, anyway.
We play teetering on the edge of illegality: it doesn’t take much to fall off the cliff. In this case, I suspect it was down to the number of changes from last week’s team – a relative lack of familiarity with each other and mistakes happen, they get pinged and that compounds things.
Looking on the bright side, if you take away the fortuitous interception score, we lost that game by one point despite getting on the wrong side of the ref and with an almost scratch team. It makes me wish we’d made fewer changes from the team that demolished Exeter.
So now it’s a week off again, then four more games to rescue something out of the season. We play three of the teams above us, meaning that we could make up significant ground with good performances. Meanwhile, the top seven will also be taking points off each other, so we have a chance of overtaking three or four of those above us.
It just needs the sort of control that we showed against Exeter in every game (and losing that Geordie monkey…). No slip-ups.
an old grey dog 