"Another angle? There was no need for another angle!"
If you turned off the TV at the end of the England v Wales game then you would have missed a fantastic four minute rant/discussion on referees. It was Shane Horgan who lead the charge, with O'Shea and Pope rowing in afterwards. They all had some choice words to say - but Horgan kicked things off so wonderfully:
We had a problem with officiating on dangerous play or reckless play throughout this tournament. There's a lot of challenges for rugby right at the moment. The authorities need to clamp down on the visible stuff and they are not doing it.
We saw with the Dave Kearney tackle in Paris, we saw with the Conor Murray raking incident a couple of weeks ago against England with Mike Brown. They were things that should have been picked up on on the field, and then the TMO and then on the citing.
Now, we've missed two levels of officialdom at the moment. We've missed the referee and the TMO. They've both ducked it. Let's just hope the citing commissioner doesn't duck it like he has the last couple of decisions.
It was at this point that Brent and especially Conor O'Shea rowed in for a spectacular put down of the referees who missed these incidents.
Both Horgan and Pope were at pains to point out that Francis' acts were a worse sin than Mike Brown's recklessness with the boot on Conor Murray.
