I think it makes it.
Franno did well to avoid any mention of his good friend and upstanding citizen Tony Copsey from the narrative however given the proximity of his punch to Christy Jenkinson’s assaults on him.
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100% I saw tweed playing senior club rugby and zero chance Francis bate him. A horrible nasty fucker…
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That’s exactly the point … it’s not unique to those two he mentions and hinting at early signs …
It might not be unique, but it is a tell, especially the nature of this particular episode.
I think as well the point is Copsey punched Franno when both were on their feet. There was no hiding place. He just socked him.
That’s a good piece by Franno.
Franno nails it but it took him a lot of words to say Rubby is vile.
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Lovely punch in fairness
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Have people moved on from trying to get Neil Francis cancelled?
He got a second chance with the Sunday times.
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Franno has undergone some racial awareness education. He’s very remorseful for inadvertently offending the Filipino community and is now rehabilitated and restored after a period of banishment and exile.
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In fairness to Franno, he wrote a great piece after the Lions Test Series in 2013 about how he was people watching on the beach one summers day and looking at all the young lads kicking around/playing volleyball etc. bemoaned how shit their skill levels were.
He was years ahead of his time.
He’s a dentist or doctor right?
Welcome back chairmanDan.
He is in his eye. A leasing salesman
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And a horrible cunt to boot, everything’s that wrong with this country
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RUGBY UNION | NEIL FRANCIS
Neil Francis: This veneer of blamelessness when it comes to referees cannot continue for ever
Neil Francis
Sunday November 27 2022, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times
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Just because nobody complains doesn’t mean all parachutes are perfect.
Our game is far from perfect and as the seasons go by it strays further from our espoused ideal of what it should be. Our champions and moral watchdogs are confined and constrained as injustice is piled upon inequity. The consistency of our officials’ inconsistency grates and our ability to have our voices heard and respected sometimes boils over.
Last Saturday’s game at the Aviva was awful. You rail up against the arm wrestle and a week later you look for answers. The penalty count was even at 12 apiece. Ben O’Keeffe could go to his bed after the game safe in the knowledge that in his mind the game had been refereed evenly.
How could you blame the referee for such a shit game? Andy Farrell and Dave Rennie never once mentioned O’Keeffe’s name. There were no really contentious calls.
Should we blame the players for such a dreadful spectacle? You can’t really — most of the time all 30 participants are game for a throwabout. In any game at any level that I have played at I don’t think that consciously, anyone has ever opted for an arm wrestle or a stop-start spectacular.
Back to the referee. If Nigel Owens did the job, the score would not have been 13-10 at the finish and the fans who were sober would not have grumbled so much. Owens was acutely aware that there were 50,000 paying customers and their patronage demands an occasional ripple of excitement. O’Keefe’s night required a good deal more than just a barely competent performance. Very few referees have empathy and that is why there is continuous discord. It leads to all sorts of problems.
On Wednesday Ronan O’Gara received a ten-week ban for “harming the best interests of rugby”. That is a significant sanction in anyone’s language. What happened again related to inconsistencies in matches over the last season or two — or in truth since the league began. O’Gara sent a very strongly worded text to Franck Maciello, French rugby’s national refereeing director. The text was long and possibly too direct and Maciello felt he had no option but to report it to Rene Bouscatel the head of the LNR, the governing body of the professional game in France. A meeting was called with Christian Dullin the secretary general of the French union (FFR), and a suspension of ten weeks was imposed with immediate effect.
O’Gara has been handed a ten-week ban for sending a text to the national refereeing director in France
Pieter-Steph du Toit gets three weeks for a diving no-arms headbutt into Jonathan Danty’s face at full pace and O’Gara gets ten weeks for sending someone a text. Must have been some text.
The committee who imposed the sanction were it seems not the only ones to see the text and so it should become available to the general public anytime soon.
The content of that text is in my view the kernel of this issue and not the notion that O’Gara was wrong to send something of that nature to the head of a refereeing body. Maybe by taking that view I am deemed to be out of order as well.
One of the great lines in the Netflix series The Last Dance was uttered by Chuck Daly the legendary Detroit Pistons head coach. An assistant coach for the Pistons was trying to corral Dennis Rodman into a little bit of structure on defence. Daly roared over at him, “Leave him be — you can’t put a saddle on a Mustang”
ROG and Rodman — that would be quite the dinner date. In a sea of sameness, O’Gara still captivates on every level. The Corkman still has a childlike wonder for the game he played and now coaches. The luminous brilliance in his understanding of the game is clear to see. He is a gem — a diamond in the rough perhaps but if I was 20 again and he was appointed as the new head coach it would at the very least constitute an adventure!
We met for breakfast in Paris a few years before Covid. The breakfast started at about 8.45am and we finished up at about 2pm. Absolutely compelling company. Relentless too, I felt like I should have brought an épée to that sword fight. Flaws? Sure, but then again, every time you look in the mirror. It is one of his great qualities — he is absolutely sure of himself. There is no Napoleonic uncertainty in his DNA. Maybe that explains the four consecutive bans. What if . . . he is right.
The dispute centres over Thomas Charabas’s refereeing of the La Rochelle v Lyon game in early September: La Rochelle won that game 23-21, yet only losers complain, right?
Then there was the spat with Christophe Urios last season in the game against Bordeaux Bègles: O’Gara’s noisiness and confrontational nature on the sideline provoked Urios into a stand-off where both coaches squared up physically to each other. Jimmy the Greek called it 50-1 on Urios.
Gleefully bellicose O’Gara was well aware of what he was doing. He was also well aware that all it would take was one punch from the physically intimidating Urios and there would have to be an off-field HIA. It’s bad boy stuff but it’s box office.
One French journalist told me how instructive things became during Covid. There were no crowds and so most voices could be heard in the stands. This journalist lost interest in the game and focused on O’Gara’s non-stop running instructions. Best 80 minutes at a rugby game that he could remember. It is one of his great qualities and the value to La Rochelle of having such an imposing figure on the sideline. That is why the ban will hurt. O’Gara can train the team but cannot go to the stadium. I am sure he will find a way to improvise. A team call in the dressing room at half- time will have to do.
What about O’Gara’s sins?
I was at the FAI cup final between Shelbourne and Derry City at the Aviva the day after the Fiji game. All the way through the game on the hoardings around the stadium were these messages: “No ref — No game” and “respect the referee”. These messages were put out in the stadium by necessity.
I don’t think our soccer brethren still can’t quite get over how much respect we show the referee — maybe too much. It is one of those metrics of behaviour that separates the two sports. Irrespective of whether it is a performance of incompetence, pure bias, or infuriating inconsistency we as rugby players most of the time unquestioningly respect the decision and walk back to the mark. On the pitch that is the way I prefer it and that is what I want to continue.
O’Keeffe came in for some criticism for his performance at the Aviva in the Ireland v Australia game
Sending a strongly worded text to the head of the referee’s commission pretty much steps across the line. You could say it was stupid thing to do. You could say that it was totally at odds with the ethos of the game. You could say that O’Gara’s ego or his drive was too much and he should have known better than to communicate with Maciello like that.
La Rochelle’s head coach has been known to ring journalists and call them out for something they have said. O’Gara did it as a player as well. Maybe that should have been something he left behind when he finished playing. It is something that he has no compunction in doing.
Maybe though you could say that this text was a brave thing to do. Maybe O’Gara on his third suspension of the year would have been mindful that if he stepped out of line again so soon that there would be a serious sanction coming his way. The guy is more than smart enough to understand what would happen once Maciello made his superiors aware of the text. Why did he do it?
Hard to know if the text was personalised or contained some bad language which would undoubtedly overstep the mark. I am not sure whether O’Gara was summoned to Paris or not but if the committee who addressed the issue sat down after imposing sentence and reflected on some of the things O’Gara may have said and has been saying for the last year, they may well have noted his rugby intelligence, and maybe that there is merit in what he has been agitating for over the last year.
I could be wrong but what if Maciello’s bosses after they closed the door on O’Gara reflected that actually he has a point. Because he always has a point whether it is riven out of frustration or of necessity. Quite often I end up agreeing with his point of view.
Referees and their constituent bodies are in effect closed order societies and when they do interact with players or coaches it is always on their terms. “This is the way we have decided to referee your game this season”. Feedback and ideas from players and coaches I respectfully suggest are brought to darkened alleys and quietly strangled.
This doctrine of infallibility and veneer of blamelessness when it comes to referees cannot continue for ever. O’Gara’s upwardly trajectory may have stalled temporarily, and we wait to see what effect this will have on his career. He was not taking any calls this week but when that text surfaces, and it most assuredly will, let’s judge ourselves on whether it was worth ten weeks
Of course it wasn’t worth 10 weeks. I’d say 1 week and a warning it’ll be doubled with each subsequent proven offence.
O’Gara is some narky fecker I’d say. A good listen though in interviews.