Fiji Water Flying Fijians captain Waisea Nayacalevu has expressed his frustration and complained about unconscious refereeing bias after losing 30-24 to England in their Rugby World Cup quarterfinals in Marseille today.
Fiji had winger Vinaya Habosi sin-binned in the first half for head-on-head contact with England’s Marcus Smith, but Nayacalevu was more annoyed with French referee Mathieu Raynal at breakdown.
“I’m very emotional at the moment, a lot has been happening in the week, and I’m just proud of the boys,” Nayacalevu said in the post match conference.
“A few calls didn’t go our way. We’re just fighting, I just ask that we can have a fair decision when the team plays.”
“Already the ruck was formed and (England’s Maro) Itoje just came in and grabbed the ball — three times in the game.”
When asked by media if he thought there was in the mind of referees an unconscious bias that favoured the bigger teams, like England, Nayacalevu erupted by saying unfair calls were made on the field.
“Absolutely! You guys watched the game, you guys can answer that.”
“It kills the momentum of our game, of what we want to play, if you know what I mean.”
“We had opportunities to win.”
On the other hand, head coach Simon Raiwalui refused to blame referee Raynal and accepted that the team had failed to take their chances.
“The referees do a great job, it’s the hardest position, you’re isolated.”
“Sure, there’s things that you contest, there’s things that you maybe don’t agree with, but first and foremost we had opportunities to score, we had opportunities to win the game.”
And Raiwalui disagreed with his captain about referees being swayed towards the Tier 1 nations.
“They do a wonderful job, they don’t go out there to pick a team.”
“Sometimes there are mistakes, sometimes the rub of the green doesn’t go your way, but it’s important we support them and don’t isolate them.”
“We’re very appreciative of everything they do.”
“A loss is a loss, it’s disappointing. We didn’t help ourselves in the first half,” admitted Raiwalui.
“Things we’d worked with in terms of penalties, defensive (penalties), side entries in the rucks.”
“We hurt ourselves with free-kick scrums, penalty scrums. We just piggybacked them and put a lot of pressure back on ourselves. We played much better in the second half but any loss is a difficult loss.”
Despite the loss and reaching the quarterfinal after 16 years, Raiwalui said he was “bursting” with pride after a tournament in which Fiji beat Australia for the first time in 69 years.
