Stephen Ferris: Former Ireland international says rugby is ‘broken’ by officiating and long games

Former Ireland international Stephen Ferris said that he felt that rugby was “broken” while watching Ireland’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’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.

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.

“World Rugby needs to find a way to not make a game of rugby 132 minutes long,” he told BBC Sport NI’s Stephen Watson.

“I have had a lot of people message me to say they got bored during the game and especially when you’re trying to bring kids, their attention span can be short at the best of times, we have to make it fast and quick.

“In Dublin it felt like the game was broken, I didn’t have a clue what was going on and if I didn’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.

“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.”