Poite was plain wrong, there is no justification

Whether Ken Owens takes a nightly double knee to give The Almighty thanks for rather more than just another day is, of course, his business and his alone.

- PETER JACKSON

That said, the last week or so will have given the Wales hooker a jolting reminder why he might wish to offer a prayer for Romain Poite, assuming he hasn’t already been doing so since the Frenchman’s impersonation of the Good Samaritan.

Rarely can one player have a more enduring reason to be truly thankful to a referee for showing compassion at a time of personal crisis.

The narrative has long since been woven into Lions folklore, how at the end of the last series in New Zealand the Sheriff of Carmarthenshire found himself without a legal leg to stand on surrounded by a posse of All Blacks all eager to have him banged to rights.

With the series in the balance, Owens had been caught red-handed playing the ball in an offside position after Liam Williams’ knock-on. An open-and-shut case of a penalty within comfortable striking distance and time rapidly running out.

Poite duly did as the law decreed. Clutching at the only straw he could find, Sam Warburton asked him to give the video another look, a request which in hindsight turned out to be a stroke of captaincy genius.

The referee’s volte-face, as inexplicable now as it was then, saved the series for the Lions. More pointedly, it got their substitute hooker off the hook of history.

The referee’s recent mea culpa brought all that flooding back, ensuring that his clanger could be heard clanking around every canyon in New Zealand. Four years after the event, Poite gave a rough idea of how the mistake had tormented him, confessing that he had ‘destroyed everything’ in the changing room at Eden Park.