{"id":2047,"date":"2025-11-25T08:56:02","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T08:56:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/?p=2047"},"modified":"2025-11-25T08:56:02","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T08:56:02","slug":"stephen-ferris-former-ireland-international-says-rugby-is-broken-by-officiating-and-long-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/?p=2047","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Ferris: Former Ireland international says rugby is &#8216;broken&#8217; by officiating and long games"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\"><b class=\"ssrcss-1xjjfut-BoldText e5tfeyi3\">Former Ireland international Stephen Ferris said that he felt that rugby was &#8220;broken&#8221; while watching Ireland&#8217;s <\/b><b class=\"ssrcss-1xjjfut-BoldText e5tfeyi3\">24-13 defeat<\/b><b class=\"ssrcss-1xjjfut-BoldText e5tfeyi3\"> by South Africa because of the officiating.<\/b><\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Referee Matthew Carley showed Ireland five yellow cards, in a game which lasted more than two hours.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">After James Ryan&#8217;s yellow card was upgraded to a 20-minute red card, Sam Prendergast, Jack Crowley, Andrew Porter and Paddy McCarthy were all sent to the sin-bin for infringements as the hosts played with 12 players for 10 minutes in the second half.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">And Ferris, who won 35 caps for Ireland, says World Rugby need an urgent review to tackle the increasing stop-start nature of international rugby games.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;World Rugby needs to find a way to not make a game of rugby 132 minutes long,&#8221; he told BBC Sport NI&#8217;s Stephen Watson.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I have had a lot of people message me to say they got bored during the game and especially when you&#8217;re trying to bring kids, their attention span can be short at the best of times, we have to make it fast and quick. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;In Dublin it felt like the game was broken, I didn&#8217;t have a clue what was going on and if I didn&#8217;t have a notion what was going on sitting on the sideline, then what did the other 52,000 people in the Aviva think. It was just a mess.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;A large part was down to Ireland of course, because of their ill-discipline, the yellow cards and the multiple penalties at scrum-time, but I feel if there was a Nigel Owens [former Welsh referee] in charge of that game it would have been handled a lot differently, there would have been more consistency and free-flowing rugby that we want to pay to go watch.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Former Ireland international Stephen Ferris said that he felt that rugby was &#8220;broken&#8221; while watching Ireland&#8217;s 24-13 defeat by South Africa because of the officiating. Referee Matthew Carley showed Ireland five yellow cards, in a game which lasted more than two hours. After James Ryan&#8217;s yellow card was upgraded to a 20-minute red card, Sam<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2048,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rugby"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}