Rassie: I’m not blaming the ref

Coach Rassie Erasmus stopped short of berating referee Andrea Piardi after the Springboks’ 21-19 defeat in Paris.

However, he spent much of his press conference describing the pressure a referee faces in front of a partisan home crowd.

Erasmus began by accepting responsibility.

“We didn’t play well, so I can’t find a lot of excuses,” he said. But his comments kept circling back to the man with the whistle.

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The Boks had dominated the scrum, and Erasmus conceded they may have asked too much of Piardi there. It was “just human,” he said, for a referee to stop penalising once he had already issued a card or two, and he spoke of understanding “what the referee goes through” with a crowd of that size.

Then came the line that carried the sting. “The referee thinks, ‘There’s a lot of people here. I can let this play out or make a technical call,’” he said.

He was quick to add a disclaimer. “I’m not blaming the ref,” he said, insisting he was speaking “with no angle”.

“We’re all human there.”

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The most bizarre moment was a French try off Kalvin Gourgues’ head. With a penalty advantage deep in the Bok 22, a French pass struck the centre in the face and bounced forward. Winger Theo Attissogbe pounced on the loose ball and dived over. Piardi correctly allowed it to stand, a moment Erasmus conceded could never be planned for.

Yet the Bok coach reserved his sharpest criticism for his own side.

“We played ourselves into that hole,” he said, calling the team “a little bit tentative” and adding that it was “probably the coaching staff” who must answer why.

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France led 21-7 at the break, and the Boks, for all their late grit and two maul tries, ultimately fell two points short.

He dismissed the short turnaround, noting that France had played later the previous weekend and had even less rest, and said: “I don’t think there’s much more to blame than ourselves.”

Photo: Florencia Tan Jun/Getty Images