ANALYSIS
PAUL REES ASKS WHETHER THE COUNTRY WHICH HAS WON 12 GRAND SLAMS CAN STILL AFFORD TO RUN FOUR REGIONAL SIDES
ACHASTENING season for Welsh rugby was summed up on Friday evening when Taulupe Faletau, 30 minutes into in his comeback after breaking his arm against Georgia in last year’s World Cup, left the field in Ulster with what looked to be a similar injury.
Wales’s head coach Warren Gatland, below, had hoped to utilise Faletau’s experience in the summer internationals against South Africa at Twickenham and on tour in Australia after a Six Nations whitewash, but a few days after long-serving hooker Ken Owens announced his retirement having failed to recover from a back injury, another fixture in the successful 2010s squad will be watching from a distance.
Faletau was playing for Cardiff at the Kingspan Stadium, a team whose results do not reflect their performances. Their two previous matches on the road, at Munster and Glasgow, also ended in narrow defeats. It was their sixth successive reverse and only at home to Leinster, when they lost by 13 points, did they fail to secure a losing bonus point.
The end in Ulster was controversial. Cardiff were leading in the final minutes and thought they had sealed victory with Theo Cabango’s third try of the evening. It was ruled out on review because of deliberate a knockon by prop Rhys Carre at the start of their counter-attack.
Carre was sent to the sinbin and John Cooney kicked the resulting penalty to give
Ulster victory by two points. A social media storm raged over the yellow card for Carre, but the prop stuck out his right arm and pushed the ball forward with Ulster in Cardiff ’s 22. By the letter of the law, and ample precedent, there was only one outcome.
That did not stop the Welsh Rugby Union, in a report of the match on its website, criticising the decision. “Cardiff were robbed of a first win in Ulster for 14 years, and their first win of 2024, when the TMO joined forces with the referee to rule out a hattrick try for Theo Cabanago (sic) and instead awarded a penalty to the home side on the 22 at the other end of the pitch.”
The headline was “Faletau injured again as Cardiff robbed of statement victory.” It was later amended to “Faletau injured again as Cardiff denied statement victory” and the text removed any hint of criticism of the officials with Carre “ruled to have deliberately knocked on a pass on his 22.”
It was a mind-boggling blunder. The next time the WRU has reason to haul a coach or player before a disciplinary committee to accuse them of bringing the game into disrepute for venting their feelings about an official, it will hardly be in a position to act as judge.
And Cardiff have made an off
