Higginbotham cited after Bledisloe Cup test

5 November 6, 2010
England 13 New Zealand 26, London
With 15 minutes left, the All Blacks were leading 23-13 and England had an attacking lineout 20 metres out. A clean take and splinter drive saw an England forward isolated and McCaw, legally, fighting for the ball.

England hooker Dylan Hartley flew in low with his forearm raised and hit McCaw in the head. The outcome was a penalty to England for Jerome Kaino entering the original maul from the side and no citing for Hartley. "With that incident, I was surprised he wasn't up," McCaw said. "I don't know whether the ref saw it or not but I certainly made it known to him that I had been hit. I don't like people to take cheap shots - that annoys me."

6 August 27, 2011
Australia 25 New Zealand 20, Brisbane
It was apparent that Cooper was still harbouring resentment towards the skipper, with the first-five chasing McCaw around Suncorp. After 54 minutes of swinging his handbag, Cooper finally struck gold when he was getting up from a ruck and drove his knee straight into McCaw's face. It looked deliberate and nasty, and he was cited but found not guilty.

7 October 23, 2011
New Zealand 8 France 7, Auckland
With three minutes left and having seen his forwards cough up the ball, centre Aurelien Rougerie sprinted 20 metres to a ruck, dived in and appeared to eye-gouge McCaw. Nothing was said at the time and the IRB played it down. A few weeks after the final, McCaw said: "The French are worse when they are scared. They were as bad as they have been and were going for the eyes."

8 September 15, 2012
New Zealand 21 South Africa 11, Dunedin
A brutal game was slipping away from the Springboks. The ball was trapped in a breakdown and McCaw was appealing to the referee for a penalty. Replacement prop Dean Greyling  from 10 metres out, he ran in and 'cleaned out' McCaw with a forearm to the jaw. He earned a two-week suspension after his yellow card.

McCaw has even been attacked by his All Black team-mates.

9 March 19, 2005
Blues 19 Crusaders 41, Auckland
The Blues were capitulating and the frustration was building. So much, in fact, that lock Ali Williams stomped on McCaw's head, earning a red card and six-week ban for his troubles.

10 April 1, 2006
Hurricanes 11 Crusaders 20, Wellington
The two best teams in New Zealand went for each other and would later meet in the final. This game had the intensity of a test as McCaw discovered when he was strangled at the bottom of a ruck for 24 seconds. He came close to passing out and described it as one of the worst experiences of his career.

Here is a real gentleman whose only weakness is that he goes hard for the ball and nothing else! His opposition seem to have the opposite idea! He even physically protected a ref from a thug when everyone else on the field stood around watching!

I believe that McCaw is a great player - but recently he has played very close to the legal requirements and get more penalties against him for transgressions.   He has his problems in that regard and no doubt some of his actions irritate opposition players.   However, he also cause problems by niggling people when a penalty is awarded against the All Blacks in the hope that it would be turned around.   In that he is sometimes successful as well.   There is nothing wrong with that - there are many players trying that one - hoping for inexperienced playes to react illegally.

Awesome good player he is - but he is no angel as well.   LOL

This could be him lying on the ball on the opposition side, getting his arms and legs tangled up with the scrum half trying to clear the ball, or he is entering from the side. lying ontop of the taclkled player, not clearing himself from the ruck by pretending he is stuck in the ruck(on the wrong side not doubt). The bottom line is that the referrees are not penalizing him enough so players are starting to take the law into their own hands. As a spectator I have become a bit frustrated with Mccaw, and I do not really support him as a player because I think he is playing a cheating negative game. I expect that Mccaw will get some more rough treatment at the end of the year tour. Not sure if the All Blacks are playing France and England but both of these forward packs will rough him up if he is playing on their side of the ruck.

In the past it was legal to ruck- use the boot studs on a players body on the wrong side of the ruck who are not making an attempt to clear the ruck, my understanding was this was very popular in New Zealand. Richie is lucky that those days are gone, as I think the New Zealand Superxv teams would have used many studs on him. Although Ali Williams stomping on his head is not good, I would not mind rucking him out of rucks. I am not in favour of serious injuries but if someone is lying on the ball and the refereee is not penalising him, many players will try the pyhsical approach to get him out of the way. Dean Greyling was just an idiot so his attempt was just useless. 

The All Blacks like to get the ball away from forwards that play as a pack with drives and pick and carry, so the All Blacks can move the ball from side to side to get their backs into the game and move away from the bigger forwards. The boks need to clear the rucks quickly to get our strong ball carriers into the game and when this was happening, we see Mccaw and co lying all over the show. This why the boks got so many penalties in the 1st half, many of these were not in kickable positions. 

---

It is rumoured that Mccaw is taking a sebatical at the start of next year because  this is when the new video ref rules start in the Southern Hemisphere. Mccaw will be working with the All Blacks coaching staff as a video analyst to see how players get penalized with the video ref interpretations. An example of this in the Soweto test when Strauss placed the ball backwards on the floor after being tackled, and Richie Mccaw was lying on his stomach after a tackle played the ball and knocked it back on the All Blacks side. On the big screen the whole crowd booed and Hieneken Meyer was screaming in the box. The All Blacks got awared a scrum as the referree though that the boks knocked the ball on. This is where the video ref is going to make a big impact through being able to reverse decisions, so it will increase the visibility of the on field referee. It will also mean more penatlies against those breaking the rules- Mccaw. 

The All Blacks allways say that a fast tempo game suits them, and it does. But they are just as keen to slow the game down for the opposition at ruck time. All teams score mostly off fast multiphase play and turn overs.  It is perhaps no co-incidence that the All Blacks best period of rugby has coincided with changes to the ruck laws, as players no longer have ability to clean out the opposition players using studs. 

-----

Bring back rucking with the boots!  

This will help the attacking team retain possesion. 

--

Also their needs to be more yellow cards for repeat offenders, as well as off field red cards to limit the amount of penalties a player can give away for the same offence. This will bring down the level of professional fowls.

No need to target him because in rugby what goes around comes around ....sometimes really painfully.

Higgerbottom does also tend to take a couple of cheap shots in each and every game....but he will eventually receive his dues.

Hahahahahaha - he is not liked Hakwa as he doesnt play if fair and square. 

But no I would prefer the guys to not be too hard on Ritchie - we are hoping he makes it to tthe next world cup after all. He can hand over the cup to the true champions the Boks!

Later interviews with some of All Blacks seemed to indicate that intentional food poisoning was unlikely, as team member Eric Rush said that they went "to the Pizza Hut down the road" spontaneously. An intentional act would have required considerable confidential intelligence and luck that seems very unlikely.[5] There has never been any conclusive evidence of any collusion to intentionally give the All Blacks food poisoning, although they were clearly ill. Rush and others maintain that if the test had been scheduled a day earlier, it is questionable whether New Zealand would have been able to field a full team at all.[5] The food poisoning symptoms were gone the day after the Final, and that has added to conspiracy theories and accusations, although that also coincides with the normal course of a case of non-lethal food poisoning.

While there were other suspicious incidents that occurred surrounding the All Blacks team in the lead up to the Final, such as listening devices that were discovered in rooms and car alarms that were set off in a synchronized fashion around the All Black's hotel early in the morning of the test in an apparent attempt to disrupt the All Blacks sleep, most investigations have concluded with varying degrees of certainty that at least with regard to the food poisoning that, while a very real situation, that situation was also almost certainly not caused by any intentional act on the part of South African partisans. If it was, the individuals responsible have covered their tracks very well in the years since, as no one is known to have admitted involvement publicly nor has any solid evidence of conspiracy, nor has the identity of "Suzie" ever come to light. The All Blacks own media liaison officer later admitted there was no evidence that the players had been deliberately poisoned.[6]

The All Blacks manager during the 1995 World Cup, Colin Meads, has blamed what he called "dodgy milk", which he and some others of the All Blacks drank after a Wednesday night gathering prior to preparing for the match. Meads also blames himself for keeping the situation secret, saying that "It was my call...we had a big night out on the Wednesday night."I was feeling not too fit the next day. And often when you are feeling like that you have a couple of glasses of milk that puts you right. We had a meeting on the Friday morning in my room and I said, 'We don't tell anyone. Tell the players not to tell anyone back home'. We didn't want anyone to know we were crook. We didn't want South Africa knowing that we were crook.[7] And that is one that I regret. We should have let people know."[7] Meads partly kept the food poisoning situation secret to not give the Springboks an advantage before the game, but apparently continued to do so for a long while afterward to not appear to be a bad sport in losing by making excuses. Meads went on to say that "I reckon that is what did us, it was in the milk. That is my theory. But no one else believes me."[7] When asked for his thoughts on intentional poisoning and the Suzie theory, Meads rather abruptly and completely discounted it, saying "Well, you just don't know. Suzie is just a fictitious person as far as I was concerned. I don't think anyone was called Suzie."[7]

All Blacks coach Laurie Mains conversely argues that the food poisoning was part of an orchestrated campaign of dirty tricks by the Springboks and their supporters. Mains argued that ""It was just an amazing sequence of events and coincidence that, of our 35-man party that ate at that particular lunch venue in the hotel here, about 27 of them went down in the space of 12 hours. You can read what you like into that, but I don't think it was coincidence. We certainly have our suspicions....[6] The chief operations executive of the investment group that owned the hotel, Helder Pereira, put the story into slightly different perspective, saying when asked that "We warned against New Zealand players eating outside the hotel and made it known to them that we could not be held accountable. I was very surprised to see the All Blacks and their management going out to eat on what was effectively the eve of the World Cup Final."[7]

Whatever the true facts of how it happened, the All Blacks were obviously suffering grievously from food poisoning. They did not request a delay in the Final for fear of giving the Springboks knowledge of the situation, and felt that they could still field an effective team, which they ultimately did, only losing by one drop kick near the end of extra time.

However in 2000, some new light was shed on this controversy. In his autobiography, Rory Steyn, the former head of security for South African president Nelson Mandela, who was assigned to the All Blacks, backed up claims suggesting their food was poisoned. In the book One Step Behind Mandela, he wrote that just days before the final the illness hit.

Steyn says in the book:

We raced back to the hotel and when I got up to the doctor's room it looked like a battle zone – like a scene from a war movie. Players were lying all over the place and the doctor and physio were walking around injecting them. I was a police officer, I worked with facts. What my eyes told me that night was that the team had deliberately been poisoned.

He said the illness which had swept through the team had a major impact on the All Blacks' preparation for the final. I had to endure accusations of complicity in this, from New Zealand officials, and I was very angry that this was allowed to happen in my country – to people in my care. South African rugby fans remained skeptical of this theory and preferred to put it down to sour Kiwi grapes. To my fellow South Africans I want to say this: Stop all those cheap jokes about Suzie, the food poisoning and whingeing Kiwis. It happened. There is no doubt that the All Blacks were poisoned two days before the final.

Of the 35 people in the All Blacks squad, only the 27 players who dined at the same venue, the team Hotel, on the Thursday night before the final, became ill. The remaining eight all dined elsewhere and were unaffected. Steve Boggan, writing in The Independent (London), also explored the possibility of the team having been deliberately poisoned. Boggan states that the private investigator that Mains hired "established that a South African waitress known only as "Susie" had been paid to slip Indian trick into the team's tea and coffee on the eve of the final. He did not say, however, how he could be sure or who had paid the waitress."[8]

Thanks for a very nice and informative post.  

The only thing I would say is you greatly underrate the ingenuity of South Africans.   IIf there is anything like alleged food-poisoning which doubtlesly did happen - you can be assured that it was not organized but accidental.    We would never dreeam of things like that - we would have used different methodology - much more effective than food-poisoning.

Let me explain further.   In the 1970's there was a French rugby touring team in SA and they were scheduled to play a combined team of Western Province - Boland  - South Western Districts in a game on the Tuseday.   On the Sunday some scoundrels collected the most beuatiful - and incidentally willing - call girls in the area and took them to the French hotel.   By Tuesday morning - the day of the match - the poor buggers could hardly walk - let alone play a decent game of rugby.   The French lost by 35-6 - and then nearly beat the Springboks in the subsequent test that Saturday.    Now if they used the same technique on the All Blacks in 1995 - then there were really reasons for complaints - bu the players would never have complained I am sure.

Suzie - not on your life - she would not be the answer for the real escapades to be expected from this side,  LOL

blatant greyling like thuggery and now watch the All Black magic curse fast track higgs into the NH as his career will now slump into the dirt,,,,oh wait hes playing for the rebels, looks like that curse has already started, lol.
hope he enjoys watching the wallabies play their first two tests without him, hardly surprising though, cos these convicts are all the same, u should see how they treat aborigines, digusting.

its not the first time dirty tactics have been used by teams to counter McCaw who is the greatest rugby player to ever grace the game and in ur example of tiquiris dodgy spear tackle, there was an off the ball incident early on where McCaw was maing a tackle and phil waugh then came in and did a blatant swining arm across McCaws jaw.
true to the curse though, waughs career slowly fizzled and his dream of representing the wallabies at the 2011 RWC??? yeah zero and he was so gutted after spending all that time investing in OZ rugby and turning down offers from overseas.normally i would have a little empathy for players who do so much for their countries, but i have a smirk on my face when i think of this dirty clown watching the RWC on the couch, douche bag convict got his kamuffins, lolz.
 

I did not know Higgingsbottam got four weeks suspension - thanks for that info.   You obviously did not see what I said about McCaw - he is a great player - but no angel - so lets leave it there.

Talking about dirty tactics - that story about the French touring team is really true - it did happen.   I still laugh at the mere memory everytime I think about it.   That is maybe why since then the poor players have no real chance to use the ample opportunities available to them - the management are really spoilsports.   LOL

Another similar memory was when I was staying over in an hotel in Kimberly.   The WP team was staying there as well.   The night before there was no young ladies around - but after the game the place was overcrowded by them.   The Sunday morning I went for breakfast and saw four cleaning ladies standing looking at a panty before the door of one of the players.   I call it after performance entertainment.   LOL

In any event - don't you work in Australia at times?    You must really never call them what you did on this site - that would be unforgiveable as far as they are concerned.    However, I am not so sure about criminal issues in Australia.   I went to Perth to see the Springboks playing Australia and stayed over in a hotel in Fremantle. When i booked in there was a notice that I must make sure that I lock the door at night with a warning  resdents must beware of criminals.    I forgot th lock the door one night and the staff must have found out - since they phoned me to make sure the door is locked.  Not nice at all. 

.