Venter set to pay stiff penalty for outburst

Saracens 15 Leicester

(GETTY)

As an exercise in futility, any attempt to gather together all the themes and nuances of Brendan Venter's 31-minute response to events at Vicarage Road would knock Monty Python's "summarise Proust" competition into a cocked hat, but this was the gist of it: referees, rather than the teams themselves, are deciding matches; the penalty system is a bad joke that generally leaves the wrong people laughing their way to another three points; and players who influence officials football-style with their appealing should be sent off (or jailed, or shot). Oh, one other thing. Saracens have been doing everything by the book, but are now wondering whether to start cheating like everyone else.

The Premiership leaders' director of rugby raised a number of further issues – it was difficult to fathom exactly how many without the aid of an abacus – but we have quite enough to be going on with. And the cause of this after-match blast? A penalty count that swung sharply away from Saracens in the second half and gave Toby Flood (whose performance on any other day would have been the talk of the town, such was its quality) enough opportunities to bag the game with the aid of his right boot.

For the life of him, he could not understand how his side went from winning three times as many decisions as Leicester in the opening 40 minutes to conceding twice as many penalties as their opponents after the break. "I really don't think referees are dishonest," he said, which must have come to some relief to poor David Rose, who has suffered more than has fair share of pain just recently. "But something happened to this ref. It's as though he walked through a maze and came out a different man. Words must have been spoken at half-time by someone, and it wasn't me. Do you really think I walked into the dressing room at 6-3 up and said 'right, guys, things are going really well, so let's start cheating'?

"I'm a positive person, I normally have a plan for things and I'm good at following rules if I know what the rules are. I'm disciplined: discipline is one of the things on which I base my life and the things we do at this club. At the end of a game, I want to be able to shake someone's hand and say: 'Fair enough, you whipped us.' I can't say that today because I don't understand what went on out there. This is not how rugby is supposed to work."

He was especially unhappy about Rose's decision to send Steve Borthwick to the cooler for a bout of "lazy running" past a Leicester ruck just as the clock ticked over into the final quarter. In the director of rugby's view, the visiting half-back Ben Youngs was guilty of gamesmanship in throwing a pass straight at the ducking, retreating England captain. "If Steve wanted to block the pass, why did he duck?" the South African asked.

He went on to raise Saracens' narrow defeat at London Irish six days previously, their first of the campaign, and made the startling claim that the Rugby Football Union's refereeing department had apologised to him for the way the Berkshire official Dean Richards had run affairs. "When we sat down and went through the video, there were 25 offences from London Irish that weren't penalised and one from us," he said. "This week, I give up. I've asked Mark McCall [one of his coaches] to have the discussion. He has a nice way with him."

Venter's opposite number declined an invitation to join in the debate. "I'm the last person you should ask," said Richard Cockerill, freshly back in public circulation following a referee-driven outburst of his own. Instead, he pointed to the supremacy of the Leicester scrum as the key factor in the outcome. "When you're struggling there and running out of ball as a result, you're bound to concede penalties," he remarked, quite correctly.

Three of Flood's second-half penalties were the result of Saracens' problems in this area, signs of which had been evident at London Irish, despite Venter's claims to the contrary on that occasion. It was another Sioux-sized feather in the cap of Dan Cole, the young Leicester tight-head prop, who, with the strong-scrummaging Louis Deacon behind him, gave both Matias Aguero and Rhys Gill all the hassle they could handle. The heavy mob were also at the heart of Dan Hipkiss' close-range try on 51 minutes, a score that gave the Midlanders a platform on which to build.

Ironically, Saracens succeeded in abandoning a platform of their own by withdrawing the button-bright flanker Andy Saull bang on the hour mark – the surest possible sign of a pre-planned substitution. "Open-side flankers use up a lot of energy and we had another one just as good on the bench in Justin Melck," explained Venter. If the last half of that sentence seemed just a little fanciful, the first half of it was a mixture of the self-evident and the bonkers. Was he really suggesting that a good breakaway forward is incapable of playing the full 80 these days? Richie McCaw and George Smith, two back-row titans closely studied by Saull over the 18 months or so, might take a very different view.

Saull's performance in the first half, capped by a cultured little chip-and-chase effort that put Leicester in such a panic that he found himself being obstructed by two players rather than the usual one and was worthy of a try, had an old Saracen of the standing of the World Cup-winner Richard Hill purring with delight. Venter has a diamond on his hands here. He should treasure it the way he treasures his sense of righteousness.

Yesterday, the RFU reacted sharply to Venter's outburst, accusing him of damaging the image of the game with his "negative public commentary" and "highly inappropriate disclosure of confidential discussions", and threatening him with a disrepute charge. Ed Morrison, the governing body's head of elite referee development, said: "We feel we have a robust review process with every referee and club, which we undertake after every game. We absolutely do not expect those conversations to be reported out of context in the public domain."

Scorers: Saracens: Penalties Hougaard 3, Jackson 2. Leicester: Try Hipkiss. Con Flood. Penalties Flood 5.

Saracens: A Goode; R Penney, K Ratuvou, B Barritt, C Wyles; G Jackson (D Hougaard h-t), J Marshall (M Rauluni 62); M Aguero (R Gill 51), F Ongaro (S Brits h-t), C Nieto, S Borthwick (capt), T Ryder (M Botha 53), W Van Heerden, A Saull (J Melck 60), E Joubert.

Leicester: S Hamilton; J Murphy (A Tuilagi 49), D Hipkiss, A Allen (J Staunton 24), L Tuqiri; T Flood, B Youngs; B Stankovich (M Ayerza 42), G Chuter, D Cole, L Deacon (capt), G Parling, B Deacon, B Woods (C Newby 48), J Crane.

Referee: D Rose (Devon).