Careful what you wish for as TMO shapes World Cup final

PARIS :Rugby is the most complex of sports and the introduction of off-field help for beleaguered referees was widely welcomed, but surely nobody could have imagined that the TMO would come to play such a pivotal role as it did in the World Cup final.

England's Wayne Barnes, widely considered the world's best referee, was at the centre of a series of high-profile calls that shaped the final, but that would have left anyone watching the sport for the first time wondering just what was going on.

By the time South Africa secured their 12-11 victory, there had been four yellow cards, one upgraded to red, in stark contrast to the previous nine finals in which only one yellow was shown in total.

New Zealand also had a wonderful Aaron Smith try chalked off via the Television Match Official for a knock-on on the other side of the pitch.

Barnes seemed to spend half the match, along with the 80,000 crowd, looking at the giant screens for replays of incidents usually brought to his attention by the TMO, the latest version of video refereeing introduced in the years after the sport turned professional in 1999.

The biggest call on Saturday was when All Blacks captain Sam Cane became the first player to be sent off in a final when his 29th-minute yellow card for smashing his shoulder into the head of Jesse Kriel was upgraded to red.

In the first two weeks of the tournament there were seven red cards, many for exactly the sort of head contact that the governing body is desperate to eradicate against a backdrop of concussion legal actions.

DISGRUNTLED FANS

Yet, amid something of a pushback from disgruntled fans and pundits, there was not another until Cane, as suddenly the bunker review system began to routinely find "mitigation" to avoid