FURIOUS COCKERILL COMPLAINS TO REFEREES’ CHIEF

EDINBURGH head coach Richard Cockerill has made an official complaint to Pro14 chiefs after insisting his team were unfairly treated by Irish referee John Lacey during Saturday’s 28-8 defeat to Scarlets in Wales. Cockerill claimed the reigning champions were guilty of crossing in the build-up to their second try and was furious the matter was not sent upstairs to the TMO despite a plea from captain Magnus Bradbury. ‘At 7-0 we made errors in the game and we need to be better at what we do, but I expect a game that’s live on TV, refereed by an international official with the facility to go to the TMO, that you check that,’ said the ex-Leicester and Toulon coach. ‘It’s crossing. It’s a penalty to us. I just want us to be refereed the same as the other team. ‘Just because he’s an international ref and they’re supposed to win, I do not want a pre-emptive decision along the lines of: “Well, Scarlets should be dominant so that’s how I’ll referee it”. I’ll be speaking to Greg Garner (Pro14 head of elite referees). ‘Why wouldn’t you go to the TMO in that situation around that potential crossing? If our captain asks the referee to have a look at it, and he’s just dismissive of it, and then it turns out we were correct, that’s a little bit disrespectful to our captain at the very least. ‘I felt certainly we were refereed slightly differently and I’ve got some examples to send to Greg. ‘For example, we had to fight a lot harder at the breakdown to get any benefit from competing for the ball than they did.’ Lacey did use the TMO to confirm that Edinburgh’s Michele Rizzo made contact with the head of Gareth Davies with a lunge around the fringes of a ruck before sending him off. ‘The upshot of Micky Rizzo is correct: the law is the law,’ conceded Cockerill, whose team will try to avoid their third straight league defeat against Leinster in Ireland on Friday. ‘But the relationship with our players and with the opposition players was very different with Johnny Lacey. Our players weren’t allowed to speak to him around TMO referrals, but their players were.’