Another Rugby World Cup quarterfinal weekend has come and gone and the way overseas critics and supporters are behaving you’d think we were witness to the kind of refereeing no show that Bryce Lawrence produced in Wellington in 2011.

Ben O’Keefe is of course also a New Zealand referee, but comparing him to his countryman, who pretty much blew South Africa out of a World Cup where they had started to attain momentum 12 years ago and might have had a good chance of winning, would be an insult to a man who presided over two of the best games so far at this year’s tournament.

The other game referred to was the Pool B game between the Springboks and Ireland. There were some gripes from South Africans, which there always are when you lose by a narrow margin, but not from memory from the Bok camp itself. O’Keefe was rightly lauded in many quarters for the fact that such a physical and fiercely fought game went off without any cards.

TRIBALISM MAKES VIEW OF CARDS SUBJECTIVE

Yes, cards are the blight of modern rugby, and everyone complains when their team suffers because of them - “But it was only accidental,” is what you so often hear from the supporters who see their team suffer because of a card. Reverse it though, and have the same thing happen and the opposition player is not sent off, and there is so much bleating you start looking around you to check there aren’t any sheep in the room.

Which there often are, figuratively speaking of course. Tribalism breeds that, and I sometimes suspect there are people who don’t really understand the subject but feel they need to conform to the view so they have something to talk about and can be part of the conversation.

But I’m digressing. My point really is that if you look hard enough for potential cards for opposition teams you will usually be able to find them because that’s the way rugby seems to be going. It’s a contact sport but if you come anywhere close to an accidental clash of heads, which frankly is often unavoidable, then there’s a potential case for a card.

So bitter French and northern hemisphere people will be able to find some, just as South Africans might if they looked. Just as there were a few things that O'Keefe got wrong towards the end that might have cost SA the game.

The Eben Etzebeth “head clash” incident that saw him go to the bin for 10 minutes at a crucial part of the game went to the bunker. They cleared him to continue and rightly so. While the yellow card was correct according to the letter of the law, I agree with former All Black scrumhalf Justin Marshall, who played a lot of rugby in a different era, that it was accidental. There should not be a card, of any colour, for that kind of incident. Full stop.

If anyone had cause for complaint, it was South Africa - those 10 minutes when a key forward was off could have cost them their place at the World Cup, and the only reason they didn’t was because the Boks were so damn good at managing the situation.

WIN AGAINST ODDS SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE TALKING POINT

And that really should have been the talking point after Sunday’s game. The Boks were rightly underdogs because they were the away team, and they faced down a really good French team that played well, left nothing out there, reversed the usual trend of it being the South Africans who win the collisions, and yet the Boks found a way to win. In front of a raucous and partisan crowd. That is the mark of a champion team.

O’Keefe only really came under the microscope post-game on Sunday because France lost and they were disappointed. And their captain Antoine Dupont let his disappointment override him to the point that he did not take a leaf out of the book set by the Bok leadership of coach Peter de Villiers and skipper John Smit in 2011.

If ever there was an occasion good sportsmanship was highlighted it was after that Bok loss in that quarterfinal - the Boks had so much to complain about, yet they stuck to a script praising the Wallabies and talking about the four year cycle they had been on.

Yes, De Villiers did have a lot to say about Lawrence subsequently, but he kept it for his book, Politically Incorrect, which came out six months after that World Cup. It was South African fans who made Lawrence the villain of the piece. And rightly so. Not that it changed the result, just like no amount of bleating from northern hemisphere scribes and supporters will change what happened on Sunday. It’s in the record books.

BREAKDOWN IN LOGIC

As for the claim that Cheslin Kolbe’s charge down of an attempted French conversion, from the touchline may I add, won the Boks the game, there’s a breakdown in logic in that claim that so many sports people and supporters fall victim to.

The only time something like that really costs a team a game, or wins a team a game, is when it happens in the final minutes. The Boks would have won at Twickenham in 2018 had Owen Farrell been rightly penalised for his illegal charge on Andre Esterhuizen and Handre Pollard had kicked it. No argument there, because it was the last move of the game.

A kicker who slots the penalty or drop-goal that makes the difference effectively does win the game for his team if it was the last play of the game. It was why poor Jack van der Schyff, who missed what would have been the winning kick against the British Lions in 1955, spent the rest of his life not being able to live that mistake down.

But here’s the thing - the simple addition of points missed and then adding them to the end score is overly simplistic. What the score says does make a difference to how teams play from that point and how they manage the game.

Had Kolbe not charged down that kick, and the score had therefore been different, it cannot be assumed the contest would have proceeded from there in the way that it did. If it was the Boks chasing the game late, and the French defending a lead, the South Africans, who did finish the game stronger, might have got it right.

It was probably because they were trailing and the Irish were leading that the Boks were on the attack late in that aforementioned Pool game, when by the way the same referee, O’Keefe, let the Irish get away with murder at the last loose scrum. Had it been the All Blacks trailing in the last minutes of that equally epic quarterfinal played this past weekend, it would probably have been them that took the ball through 37 phases in a desperate quest to win it, and not Ireland.

OPPORTUNITIES MISSED CAN’T JUST BE TALLIED UP

I remember at school being part of a cricket game that was tied in an exciting finish and afterward my team spent time lamenting dropped catches earlier in the opposing side’s innings that might have left us as winners. I pointed out that it might, but it also might not have - had the catches been taken another batsman would have come in to face different bowlers and would not have faced the ball that got him out. He ‘might’, that word again, have got set and scored more than he did. Three missed catches does not equal three wickets.

It’s not about simple addition, and there’s nothing more logic defying than the addition of missed penalty kicks to tally up what a rugby team should have ended with. Nope, if the first kick had not been missed, the game would have been restarted from halfway, the defending team would have had an opportunity to set up in the opposition half, and the next penalty may not have come. Three missed kicks does tally nine points, but you can’t just add it to the score as the game would have had a different flow had the first one been landed.

In soccer, a missed penalty leads to a different restart to what you would have had the penalty been scored. So if a goal scoring chance is missed a minute later, you can’t add the two together to make two. It’s the same in rugby.

Yes, Kolbe’s intervention was crucial for the Boks. He should be lauded for it. But it is illogical to say it won his team the game, or it lost France the game. The focus on that incident on the assumption it cost France the game is actually idiocy.