Official West Hartlepool RFC

Very restrained macth report. I am afraid I thoight our visitor's roughhouse tactics were poor to say the least. I hope we don't see them in the same league again until they have cleaned up their act.

I heard a comment ( I was watching Ams game) that the referee was the most dangerous Referee that person had ever seen. I cant comment cos only watched bout 5 minutes and saw 3 tackles head high. One nearly took Mikey Youngs head off completely.

It wasn't the referee doing the high tackles.
He is a only 23 and is being fast tracked and will very probably end up doing professional games. By all accounts he is a very quick learner and no doubt will have learnt a lot from yesterday's game!
Good luck to him.

not slagging the ref off at all as I said cant comment, only what someone told me, and as for the high tackles, players need to look at themselves and think.
We had a 17 yr old yesterday and he grows in confidence the more he refs, done 3 games of ours this season and the difference from 1st to yesterday is remarkable.
I all for refs without them the game would be lost. I couldnt do it.

yeah fair play to the ref yesterday...it was a tough game to referee with a lot going on and i thought he did well under pretty severe pressure at times.
should have a promising future with the whistle

Missing your enforcer?

Sheffield's dirty play was very dissapointing. They'd obviously travelled up to the game with a bad attitude - their scrum half was mouthing off about who was going to give Myers a "slap" within the first two minutes of the game. As it turned out, Mikey Young took the brunt of it - the high tackle already mentioned, one of the stamping incidents, the punch that led to the red card, and another punch after that.

I though our lads did well not to get involved because things were in danger of getting out of control.

I agree with the comments in the report about the "running from every position" tactics. Its one thing to have an expansive game plan, but we need to be sensible enough to see that occasionally we will need to kick it when we are on our own line. Good teams will punish us for making mistakes when trying to run it from our own line.

Also, if the policy is to try and run every penalty we get, thats fine but when the ref has stopped play to talk to a player giving their defense time to line up ready for the runner and we have the penalty on the half way line, surely a better option is to kick the ball in to the corner for a line out. If you're going to run, you need to go quickly (as west did well many times) but if the defense has had time to get set, there's no point.



Post Edited (08-01-07 11:35)

No problem with the Referee. Once he got to grips with what was going on he took action and things improved a bit. One red and three yellows speaks for itself.

Should have been a penalty try when Dan Boatman nearly had his head taken off, a few yards from the line. Sheffield player made no attempt to tackle Dan properly. If the ref had awarded the penalty try, maybe Sheffield would have knocked their "bad boy" tactics on the head!

That was second half.
They started the game trying to put our youngsters off their stride but it worked against them. Other opposition please take note.

i thought cries of penalty try at the time were ambitious to say the least. don't think i would have given it. i wasn't that close to the incident but it did look like other players were in the area that might have made the tackle and it seemed a decent distance away from the line.
the ref has to be sure a try would be scored....pen in front of the posts and a sin-bin was the right call for me

Good job Chocky, Anth and Slob werent playing by the sound of it.
:oD:oD:oD:oD:oD


Then agin if they were they probably wouldnt have tried it on. Well done to thel ads for sticking to rugby and getting the result.

I was one of the closest spectators to this incident.
Dan was tackled a few metres from the line and the player who high tackled was the only one able to stop Dan scoring. So, in my opinion, Dan was prevented from scoring by an illegal tackle. Opens up the "penalty try" debate, again.
By the way, I was stood next to a respected retired ref at the time and he thought it should have been a penalty try too!

penalty try or not, i don't think anything would have "encouraged" sheffield to ditch their "physical" tactics. How many times did the ref warn their captain?? I didn't see any messages getting passed on to his team to calm down, if anything their captain was arguing with the ref.

I think Sheff have every right to scrap their way out of trouble; they blatantly can't play their way out so they may be able to grab some points by rough housing! Facing down thuggery is part of the game isn't it?

No. Playing hard rugby is one thing, deliberately setting out to hurt someone is quite another.

If people are going to resort to thuggish tactics then the referee should send them off. We had an ugly incident in our game on Saturday. How the Blyth substitute received only a yellow card continues to amaze me.

Well said Techlad, totally agree with your comments about playing hard and not blatant thuggery and going out to hurt someone on the pitch.