You say ‘potato’, I say ‘what potato?’
Bath head coach Mike Ford claimed his side “dead set” should have had a penalty with the last play of his side’s 18-15 loss to Leinster.
The English side were pressing for an equalising score, with seconds to go, when French referee Jerome Garces called an ‘in from the side’ penalty against Matt Garvey rather than pinging Leinster players for not releasing and going off their feet.
When presented with Ford’s grumbles, Leinster head honcho Matt O’Connor remarked, ‘Mike thought it was a penalty, did he? Why am I surprised by that? It’s one of those, there are loads of 50/50 penalties in the game.
‘I thought the penalty probably six or seven minutes before that, against us, I thought Francois Louw was straight in the side on the half-way. We get the penalty there, we go to the corner, we probably kill the game.’
O’Connor added, ‘You could talk about a load of instances, the TMO, the Fergus McFadden getting knocked out [by Anthony Watson]; there’s loads of them. I thought Jerome [Garces] refereed very, very well. I think he’d probably as accurate as there is a referee in Europe at the moment. It’s one of them.’
Leinster missed a worrying 26 tackles and had a 75% success rate of stopping Bath with ball-in-hand. If someone had told the Aussie, before the match, that his team would miss one in four tackles and still reach the Champions Cup semi-final, would he believe them?
‘No, definitely not,’ he admitted.
‘I thought the scramble [defence], post some of those misses, were really important, but there was never a question that the group wouldn’t work really hard and play for everything. A game with the stakes that were on display, there was always going to be a massive display.
‘We’ve got some work to do, no question, but we’ll take the result.’
