There was anger, of course. There always is on the morning after a loss like the one France suffered on Sunday night. And at Le Rugby bistro, on Rue Roquépine in Paris’s 8th district, one of the four old men standing at the bar was venting his. The referee, Ben O’Keeffe, was a fool, he explained again, it had been a deliberate knock on, he repeated. The others, who, you guess, had heard all this from him more than once already, pursed their lips, pulled on their ears and nodded in agreement, silent as Philippe Sella and Didier Camberabero and Pierre Berbizier and all the other old players in the black and white photos on the wall.
Antoine Dupont was right, the man continued, O’Keeffe wasn’t up to it. O’Keeffe, it seems, like all referees, isn’t just there to run the game, but to give the losers someone to blame after it.
