Saturday - the first semifinal

ARRGGHH - a good way to start off Saturday's blog, although it refers more to the end than to the beginning.

Saturday started with our last visit to the Otago Farmer's Market.  It will be one of many things that we'll miss about Dunedin when we go back to Perth.  The quality and taste of the food we have bought here has been superb.

Yummy hot crepes

We ordered our usual ham and cheese crepe from the genial and genuinely French crepe stall and our coffee from the Mou Very van and fed morsels of crepe to the brown sparrows.

The jacket worn by the lady with the blonde hair in the photo to the left is colloquially known as a puffer jacket in NZ. Note that it is black, as in All Black.

Eat no evil, eat Havoc!

 

Mike paid a ritual visit to the Havoc stand and got invited to the Havoc Pork shop opening in the High Street next Friday at lunchtime and he will certainly be there with their promise of spit pig and pork pies.


Loaded up with what we needed to complete our last week of holiday, including girdle scones and homemade German apple cake, we headed home and unloaded our supplies.  We then blogged three days of activities to bring ourselves up to date.  Fi went off to photograph her beloved stadium, put petrol in the car ($104 ouch) and dropped in to the NZ Rock and Mineral Show at the Forbury raceway, this time finding the prizewinners exhibition hall, not the sales area. 

Beloved 30,000-seater Forsyth Barr stadium with Dunedin railway station in foreground

We had dinner when Fi returned and then we got ready to go down to Pirates for the Wales v France semi-final.
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It was good to catch up with our friends at Pirates, whom we hadn't seen for a couple of weeks because we went to Auckland for the quarter finals. 

The majority of the club seemed to be supporting Wales with a few diehard French supporters lurking in the crannies.

The match kicked off and all seemed to be going Wales' way until their captain Sam Warburton made a dangerous tip tackle in the 17th minute and the referee showed him the red card.  This put Wales on the back foot.  France managed to kick three penalties and missed one drop goal, but that was the extent of their scoring.  In the end, Wales could have won it but for a poor day with the boot (they missed three penalties and a conversion) and France won the match 9-8.  Wales and their fans were gutted and France got through to the final with a very lacklustre and unimaginative game, planning more on "not to lose" rather than to win.

There will be reams of speculative discussion on what people say the referee should have done, but the IRB has taken a strong position on dangerous tackles:

Law 10.4(j) reads: Lifting a player from the ground and dropping or driving that player into the ground whilst that player’s feet are still off the ground such that the player’s head and/or upper body come into contact with the ground is dangerous play.
 

A directive was issued to all Unions and Match Officials in 2009 emphasizing the IRB’s zero-tolerance stance towards dangerous tackles and reiterating the following instructions for referees:

- The player is lifted and then forced or ‘speared’ into the ground (red card offence)

- The lifted player is dropped to the ground from a height with no regard to the player’s safety (red card offence)

- For all other types of dangerous lifting tackles a yellow card or penalty may be considered sufficient

Warburton didn't spear Clerc into the ground with malice, but there is little doubt that Clerc's safety was compromised by the tackle even if there was no malicious intent, so the second case applies. The IRB also stress that "any player who puts a player in the air or caused a player to be put in the air has a responsibility to ensure that the player is brought to the ground safely".

While Wales' valiant game was ultimately unsuccessful, I'm sure that given the young age and high skills levels shown, they will be mounting a strong challenge at the next RWC in 2015 in England.


And now we are all on tenterhooks for the All Blacks v Wallabies tonight.  The papers are full of puff pieces as each side tries to claim underdog status and pundits from both sides of the Tasman claim superiority for their team.  We will find out in a few very tense hours!