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Speak louder to foreigners!

If I were a French rugby club I would seriously consider whether it is worth contesting the rest of the Heineken Cup. The odds are so stacked against them that the concept of fair play has been lost.

One old Harlequins grandee took me to task yesterday for saying that Harlequins were outrageously fortunate to be awarded at least half the points of their famous win over Stade Francais in Paris last weekend. I had to gently point out that if I were Quins, and the beneficiary of such largesse, I’d stop complaining about the messenger and take the win and move on.

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But for goodness sake, don’t let anyone tell you that Stade Francais were not crucified by officialdom, because they were. Or that both Biarritz, who lost to Cardiff, and Perpignan, who lost at Leicester, had anything but the worst of the refereeing, and a total lack of what they were due from officials in this so-called professional sport. French rugby is always stuffed by refereeing. It is one of the first laws of the sport. Sad, but true.

The second Quins try was a farce. There may, or may not, have been an early tackle on a Stade player just feet from the Harlequins line but the loose ball broke to Mike Brown who, from a position a few metres behind his own line, hoofed the ball way down the touchline.

Two Harlequins, standing around 12-15 metres offside in front of the kicker, started following up, including Jordan Turner-Hall, the scorer. The jolly old touch-judge, who was almost directly alongside, not only never bothered to tell the ref that something was badly wrong, he actually trolled off down the other end too.

It then got even more mystifying. Djibril Camara of Stade was about to seize a loose ball near half way when one of the Quins forwards wiped him out in the season’s most blatant early tackle. Turner Hall then ran on with the loose ball to score.

Amongst a welter of further controversies, referee Alan Lewis allowed play to proceed leading to a later and critical Quins penalty and three points, after the ball shot out of the side of a Stade attacking scrum. That scrum should have been called back.

Then in the closing stages, Lewis ignored what I consider to be, after a reviewing of every angle confirmed my initial live impression, the most blatant sin-binning act in the history of the sin-bin. Jim Evans of Quins halted a move which was within inches of the Quins line, with a horrific offside kill. He stayed on.

The actual errors were less garish in the Biarritz and Perpignan games, but what grated terribly to me was the disadvantage that the two France sides operated under. These days, preventative refereeing is all the rage. Referees and refereeing bosses set mighty store by endless communicating with players so that they know exactly what referees are asking.

At least, they know if they speak English. George Clancy at Cardiff and Nigel Owens at Leicester, as far as I can glean from the playbacks and the refereeing soundtrack, would not even make a re-make of that shocking “comedy” 'Allo 'Allo. Owens in particularly merely squawked at Perpignan in a louder voice to get his English message across.