The whistle in Soweto: five calls everyone is still arguing about

Nika Amashukeli was always going to be the third man in this Test. The Georgian was appointed to the Cape Town match and missed it through illness, arrived in Soweto with both camps having lodged scrum footage with the officials all week, and carries history with New Zealand: he refereed the 43-10 defeat in Wellington last year, the heaviest in All Blacks history. The All Blacks are now 3-3 in Tests he has controlled.

By fulltime at FNB Stadium, 1News' Patrick McKendry was writing that Amashukeli "clearly favoured the home side" at the breakdown, a South African columnist was writing that the Springboks "finally got their just reward", and social media was holding both positions at once, loudly. Here is what the record actually shows on the five calls people are still arguing about, and what it does not.

The penalty try

The sequence: Manie Libbok's counter-attack put South Africa on the All Blacks' line, Ruben Love was sin-binned, the Springboks took a five-metre scrum, and in the 37th minute Amashukeli ran to the posts. That levelled the game 12-12 just before halftime.

On the question of fault, the reporting is unusually united. The official All Blacks match report, RNZ, RugbyPass, AFP and every South African outlet describe a dominant Springbok scrum and New Zealand infringing to stop it: "attempts at halting the momentum were deemed illegal", as RugbyPass put it. Some New Zealand supporters saw an early Springbok shove and a lost ball at the base; no match report records either, and the one account that mentions the television official at all, News24's live coverage, says the TMO reviewed the passage and confirmed the award.

There is one legitimate law question buried in it. World Rugby's Law 8.3 says a penalty try is awarded when foul play prevents a probable try, and that "a player guilty of this must be cautioned and shown a yellow card or sent off". Love's card came for the earlier cynical offside, before the scrum was set. No report identifies any All Black carded for the scrum offence that produced the penalty try itself. It may have been absorbed into the sequence; on the published record, it is a loose end.

Reinach and Roigard

In the middle of that same passage, Cobus Reinach lifted Cam Roigard off the ball and dumped him to the turf. The sanction was a penalty to New Zealand at the restart. No card, and as of Sunday night no citing.

This is the incident with genuine heat in it. "Dropping a fella, who never had the ball, on his head isn't a tip tackle. It's foul play and should be a yellow card minimum," posted rugby commentator Jim Demps, in a post carried by UK site Ruck. The law he leans on is real: 9.18 forbids lifting a player and dropping or driving them so the head or upper body hits the ground.

While descriptions of the replays, and News24's live account, have Roigard grabbing and holding Reinach off the ball before he was thrown down, retaliation has never been accepted. Therefore had Reinach done nothing he would have been just under Law 9.15. None of which settles whether a lift-and-dump off the ball deserves more than a penalty. The citing window runs into early this week; if anything changes, that is when.

The Love yellow

Love's 36th-minute card was for deliberate offside defending the line, "a cynical action in defence" in the official report's words. Unusually harsh as it was a first offence, when historuically ref's give 5-6 penalties before a Yellow card, in this case it was rather quick off the mark. Ruck's ratings noted Love "had defended well before that", supporting the view that his own hands were clean until that moment. Rennie, who otherwise declined to criticise the officiating, called this one "hard to take". McKendry went further, calling it "a line call at best". No report says whether the TMO was consulted; none suggests it was.

The knockdown that was not a penalty try

The card mirror-image came in the 9th minute, when Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu stuck out a hand and killed Ardie Savea's offload to an unmarked Peter Lakai. Yellow card, no penalty try. McKendry's verdict: "a yellow card and a penalty try would not have been an inappropriate sanction." The South African reading, via the Daily Maverick, was a player "going for a 50/50 ball". Two mitigations for the officiating crew: even the South African ratings conceded Feinberg-Mngomezulu could have "no complaints" about the card, and the All Blacks scored through Savea from the very next lineout anyway, taking seven points from the passage.

The scrum ledger

The pattern is real and documented: Springbok scrum penalties at the first feed, at 50 minutes, at the first two scrums after halftime, and the penalty try in between. Repeatedly and clearly seen on all footage of pushing heavily on the 'set' call which is where the two teams are meant to hold the opponent weight until "Engage" the 3rd call is made, but never penalised for it. Then, at 52 minutes, with Thomas du Toit just on, Amashukeli penalised South Africa for "walking around, stepping in", the exact species of offence Dave Rennie had accused the Boks of all week, and Planet Rugby noted the referee "was now drawing a very different conclusion" two minutes after rewarding the same scrum.

Whether that ledger reads as inconsistency or as a referee calling each scrum on its merits is where the two countries part company. AFP judged that he "policed the set piece well"; Ruck graded him B+. Rennie, pointedly, took the scrum calls on the chin: "They got rewarded for dominance at times, so no issues with that." Stand-in captain Luke Jacobson thought the scrum "was competitive". And Rassie Erasmus, of all people, argued the scrums were "pretty even, and it could easily have gone against us". The angriest voices were unofficial: the account Chalyn Rugby posted "Nika Amashukeli made a lot of technical errors today. A LOT", while another rated him "one of the Top 3 referees in the world" on the same evidence.

Where it lands

No citings, no rescinded cards and no statement from World Rugby had appeared by Sunday night, and the ex-referee columns that usually adjudicate these weeks land early in the new week. What is already clear is the shape of the argument: New Zealand's grievances live in the fine margins of two cards and one uncarded dump tackle, South Africa's answer is a scrum that did its talking legally (Beacuase the push on the 'set' call was never correctly called), and the referee walks to Baltimore with both a B+ report card and a nation quoting Will Jordan's raised eyebrow at him. As McKendry wrote, that look "probably summed up the feelings of an entire nation". The other nation, of course, was applauding.